• take all of the elements of an author's verbal presence--his/her imagery and ideas, personae, sense of narrative, metaphoric language--as means of personal development, attempts to achieve, on the behalf of the self, "ontological integrity" (Lawall 198). 

• seek to discover what Poulet has called the "point of departure"--that "act from which each imaginary universe opens out" (Miller, "The Geneva School," 478 and "The Literary Criticism of Georges Poulet," 481)--which lies at the heart of every word an author wrote. 

• try to isolate the "unit passages"--those recurrent obsessions of an author's work which serve as the fundamental landmarks of an author's "interior distance" (Miller, Charles Dickens, ix), Poulet's name for the inner space of consciousness, populated by the objects of an author's world, within whose "vacancy" the author draws close to, or feels separated from, the world as it is "redisposed" there (see Poulet, The Interior Distance; Miller, "The Geneva School," 478). 

• seek to bring to light "the original unity of a creative mind" (Miller, Charles Dickens, ix) by following, through the mediation of an author's "art/science," the "metamorphoses of a circle," the expansions and contractions of the self as it seeks to find its orientation in the exterior world [see Poulet, The Metamorphoses of the Circle; Miller, "The Literary Criticism of Georges Poulet," 483-84]) of his/her mind. 

• concern themselves with the whole of an author's work, believing that "all works of a single writer form a unity, a unity in which a thousand paths radiate from the same center" (Miller, Charles Dickens ix), seeking throughout to find that center, the discovery and articulation of which they consider to be an activity higher than both formal analysis and biography. 

• slight the "how" of an author's art, not due to any lack of appreciation of the texture of his/her writing, but because they are engaged in a "criticism of consciousness," not textual analysis or deconstruction. 

• aspire to be non-judgmental and not engage in critical debate over an author's strengths or weaknesses as a stylist. 

• believe that the "intimacy" which criticism requires "is not possible unless the thought of the critic becomes the thought of the author criticized, unless it succeeds in re-feeling, in re-thinking, in re-imagining the author's thought from the inside" (Miller, "The Geneva School," 468-69), aspiring toward what J. Hillis Miller terms "coincidence" between the mind of the critic and the author studied. 

• would agree with J. Hillis Miller that "every significant critical study"--even a new book on Shakespeare, or one on Dickens--brings by emphasis and discovery a new author into the world ("An Exercise" 284). This is true, as Miller elsewhere observes, because the imaginal universe of a great artist is virtually infinite and capable of engendering more and more readings of its structures and meanings.

Lawall, Sarah N. Critics of Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1968.
Miller, J. Hillis. "The Antitheses of Criticism: Reflections on the Yale Colloquium." Modern Language Notes LXXXI (1966), 557-571.
___. Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959.
___. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
___. "Geneva or Paris? The Recent Work of Georges Poulet," University of Toronto Quarterly 39 (1970). 212-228.
___. "The Geneva School: The Criticism of Marcel Raymond, Albert Beguin, Georges Poulet, Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, and Jean Starobinski," The Critical Quarterly VIII (1966). 302-321; also in The Virginia Quarterly Review XLIII (Summer 1967). 465-88; and in Modern French Criticism. Ed. J. K. Simon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. 277-310.
___. "Georges Poulet's 'Criticism of Identification,'" The Quest for Imagination. Ed. O.B. Hardison, Jr. Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971. 191-224.
___. "The Literary Criticism of Georges Poulet," Modern Language Notes LXXVIII (1963), 471-488; also in The Quest for Imagination. Ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971. 191-205.
___. "Literature and Religion," Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Contributions. Ed. James Thorpe. New York: MLA, 1967. 111-126; also in Religion and Modern Literature: Essays in Theory and Criticism. Ed. G. B. Tennyson and Edward E. Ericson, Jr. William B. Eardmans Publishing Company, 1975. 31-45.
___. "An Exercise in Discrimination." Yale Review 59 (1969): xxx.
___. The Poets of Reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965.
___. Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Harvard University Press, 1970).
___. "Williams' Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry," Daedalus, 99 (1970), 405-434.
Poulet, Georges. The Interior Distance. Trans. Elliott Coleman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964.
___. "The Dream of Descartes." Studies in Human Time. Trans. Elliott Coleman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956.
___. The Metamorphoses of the Circle. Trans. Carley Darwson and Elliott Coleman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.
___. "The Phenomenology of Reading." Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1971: 1213-22.
___. Studies in Human Time. Trans. Eliott Coleman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1956.