Uncertain Curves and Outrageous Angles

An Admirable Exercise in Deformance

Inspired by Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels' Deformance and Interpretation, this project is a collection of programmatic deformance experiments to three texts: "The Box-Social," by James Reaney, "The Story of an Hour," by Kate Chopin, and "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Deformance

Film and media scholar Jason Mittell summarizes the aim of deformance as "striv[ing] to make the original work strange in some unexpected way, deforming it unconventionally to reveal aspects that are conventionally obscured in its normal version and discovering something new from it." In Samuels and McGann's essay, deformance involves repeated operations on a written text, then iterating on the formal aspects of the operation in order enact "strateg[ies] of estrangement" from our usual reception or interpretive frame for understanding our object of study. Examples include rearranging paragraphs in backwards order and parts of speech manipulation like erasure or grouping are explored by this project in some flavor or other.

Project Sections

At present, the project is divided into three sections, each focusing on a particular text manipulation method.

Parts of Speech

This section explores how grouping by parts of speech might illuminate themes from these texts that may not be evident from reading linearly. Three pages group adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs of each work. Another page collects the adjective–noun pairings, that is, any time in these works when a noun is preceded by an adjective.

Paragraph Reversal

Emily Dickinson asks: "Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have—a Something overtakes the Mind" (Prose Fragment 30, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson [Cambridge, Mass., 1958], vol. 3, p. 916). Here we take her suggestion and give readers an opportunity to read these three stories' paragraphs in reverse order.

Thematic Tagging

In this section we've added thematic tags to each paragraph of these stories and filtered the text so only paragraphs with the selected tag appear. We've also included, "The Yellow-Wallpapered Box-Social Story of an Hour," in which we've manually spliced together all three of these stories into one. In a future iteration of this project we hope to write code that will splice together these stories based on the thematic tags we created.