I got to around the part of Mark Sample’s article “Notes Towards a Deformed Humanities,” in which he states, “Reading backwards revitalizes a text, revealing its constructedness, its seams, edges, and working parts,” and then I scrolled to the bottom of the article and started to read it backwards.

Obviously this is not what Strange intended. I hardly understood what he was saying. So I went back and read the article normally.

While I think it would be a good exercise for someone writing an essay, in order to see any glaring flaws in paragraph transitions, reading backwards did not help me understand the purpose of his text any more. It would be interesting to try it with poetry, as he refers to that. However, I think I would get more personal enjoyment out of things by reading forwards. Doing something backwards reminds me of starting at the end of a maze. It seems to make the solution to the maze easier. It dries it up. The maze no longer seems organic or wild. I think the same would occur with literature.

However, while reading text backwards would dry a text right up, it may be helpful for some types of scholarship. Certainly, reading a text backwards could be a blessing to what Strange calls “the branch of digital humanities that focuses on text analysis and data-mining.” Data-mining sounds like something that would naturally be “deformance,” a term that Strange uses. Strange makes a clear argument for the utility of deformance, but as with many critical lenses, it is limited. The majority of the time, I think we need literature in a holistic sense, rather than fragmented.

Sources: http://www.samplereality.com/2012/05/02/notes-towards-a-deformed-humanities/

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