Misreading Shelley, Misreading Theory: Deconstruction, Media, and Materiality

Abstract

In 1986, one of the most eminent and influential literary scholars of the late twentieth century, J. Hillis Miller, was asked to give the Presidential Address at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Here, Miller proclaimed the ‘triumph of theory’, which has preoccupied English Studies for the last twenty-five years at least. For some years now, however, a distinct weariness towards this triumph of theory—or rather: Triumph of Theory with a capital T—can be felt amongst many. Variously, a time After Theory has been proclaimed. The aim of this contribution is to suggest ways of doing English Studies after Theory—but not without theory. In order to go beyond Theory there is no other way than to go through Theory once again to understand what went wrong in the application of philosophical, sociological, political, psychological, and other theories to the field of literature.

Miller’s title for his Presidential Address is a reference to one of the poets that preoccupied him at the time, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his poem ‘The Triumph of Life’—a poem that was at the heart of one the most influential theory readers, Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), and that has been analysed by Miller, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida, respectively. In this chapter the author demonstrates how especially Miller and de Man misread Shelley in order to be able to apply their version of deconstruction to the poem. Finally, it offers an alternative reading of Shelley’s poem that opens the poem to new ways of analysis. These new approach to literature is one that takes the materiality of the medium of literature, the book, seriously, and that tries to situate this medium within a network of social and cultural forces.