“It has always seemed to me that literature is, in one way or another in different cases, anomalous or strange in its use of language. This is a distinguishing feature of literature: the weird way in which language is used in it.”

—J. Hillis Miler, from The J. Hillis Miller Reader.

I wonder if I’m using language strangely enough in my own work, and what I’m doing to make literature separate from criticism (or criticism into literature, which also, to my mind, requires the use of language as more than mere description in the same way that humans are more than just collections of cells).