J Hillis miller, one of the leading exponents of deconstruction, makes a deconstructionist reading of which of the following poems of P.B Shelley?
Correct Answer :
“The triumph of life”
Solution :
The correct answer is “The triumph of life”.
Step-by-step Explanation:
Deconstruction is a school of literary criticism that emerged in the late 1960s, heavily influenced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida. It aims to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete, whole, and stable entity, but instead contains internal contradictions, multiple meanings, and gaps that undermine its own coherent logic or singular interpretation.
J. Hillis Miller, a prominent American literary critic and a key member of the "Yale School" of deconstruction (which also included Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom), applied these deconstructive techniques to various Romantic poems.
In his seminal essay titled "The Critic as Host" (published in 1979 in the collection Deconstruction and Criticism), as well as in other writings, J. Hillis Miller performs a detailed deconstructive reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s unfinished poem, “The Triumph of Life”. Miller examines the poem's complex imagery, its allegorical structure, and the way it questions the possibility of achieving a unified presence or absolute truth, showing how the text constantly dismantles its own figures of speech and narrative authority.
Therefore, the poem deconstructed by J. Hillis Miller is indeed “The Triumph of Life”.
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