The central readings for Class 18 are Lisa Samuels and Jerome J. McGann, "Deformance and Interpretation" (1999) and Mark Sample, "Notes Towards a Deformed Humanities" (2012).  Prior to class, each student should edit the page titled "Passages chosen for discussion for Class 18" (located in the practicum folder for the day) to mark out a passage or map in the chapter that they think is worth discussion or have a question about.  (Be sure to "save" the page when you are done, both to save your work and to release the editing lock so that others can edit!)

Use the following format:

Your Name -- Passage to Discuss:

(Page number) -- Type the quote if it is not too long; otherwise, just  indicate the page numbers or the figure (map) number.

Start below here (and separate your entry from others' with a horizontal rule)

Angelica Pfingsten -- Passage to Discuss:

(29) -- Dickinson's critical model is performative, not intellectual. Indeed, in an important sense it is antitheoretical: not because it is opposed to theory (that is, speculative thought), but because it places theory in a subordinated relation to practice.

Samantha Burke – Passage to Discuss:

(4) -- The Deformed Humanities—though most may not call it that—will prove to be the most vibrant and generative of all the many strands of the humanities. It is a legitimate mode of scholarship, a legitimate mode of doing and knowing. Precisely because it relies on undoing and unknowing.

Nicole Mainardi - Passage to Discuss:

(42) -- [Deformance and Interpretation] Read as prose, then, the poem disassembles itself grammatically but increases in "meaningful" assertion. The "independence" of the sentences comes undone, so if readers want to form some completion of the poem's sense they must do so non-syntactically, willfully...undoing its grammar, and flouting punctuation rules.

Karissa Miskell-Passage to Discuss: 

(36)--Reading Backward is a highly regulated method for disordering the senses of a text.  It turns off the controls that organize the poetic system at some of its most general levels.  When we run the deformative program through a particular work we cannot predict the results.  As Dickinson elegantly puts it, “A Something overtakes the Mind,” and we are brought to a critical position in which we can imagine things about the text that we did not and perhaps could not otherwise know. 

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Max Hillman - Passage to Discuss

(Article) -- As Samuels and McGann put it, reading backwards “short circuits” our usual way of reading a text and “reinstalls the text—any text, prose or verse—as a performative event, a made thing” (Samuels & McGann 30). Reading backwards revitalizes a text, revealing its constructedness, its seams, edges, and working parts.