Miller as a writer whose work does something more profound and violent
to literary conventions than produce novel effects: it announces the
possibility of difference and instability within language itself.
Henry Miller is a cult figure in the world of fiction, in part due to
having been banned for obscenity for nearly thirty years. Alongside the
liberating effect of his explicit treatment of sexuality, however,
Miller developed a provocative form of writing that encourages the
reader to question language as a stable communicative tool and to
consider the act of writing as an ongoing mode of creation, always in
motion, perpetually establishing itself and creating meaning through
that very motion. Katy Masuga provides a new reading of Miller that is
alert to the aggressively and self-consciously writerly form of his
work. Critiquing the categorization of Miller into specific literary
genres through an examination of the small body of critical texts on his
oeuvre, Masuga draws on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of a minor
literature, Blanchot's "infinite curve," and Bataille's theory of
puerile language, while also considering Miller in relation to other
writers, including Proust, Rilke, and William Carlos Williams. She shows
how Miller defies conventional modes of writing, subverting language
from within.
Katy Masuga is Adjunct Professor of British and American literature,
cinema, and the arts in the Cultural Studies Department at the
University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle.