In the past three months, this chapter has taken on a whole new form. I had a meeting with my dissertation workshop in late October that revealed to me how I was writing around the argument I wanted to make, which is about deconstructing (in NKM's words) "the fantasy of the falsifiable." So I cut about half of what I had already written, the sections on the digital, queerness, and touch, and moved that to an introductory chapter. What remained was the section where I critique "reproducible" criticism, and that was pretty much it. Around this section, I've written another on textual scholarship and deformance, and one on queer performance. I'm now working on the final section of the chapter, where I synthesize aspects from deformance and preformance to present a new approach for "queer" text analysis. After that, I will write up a quick intro that begins be presenting a critique of the falsifiable, which I position as forerunner to the reproducible.

The burden of the chapter is to describe how to do text analysis in a way that attends to queer concepts of performativity, and how that method enhances the critical process. It begins by debunking the fantasy of falsifiable criticism, presenting a critique of moretti's methodology and stylistic approach (eventually with accompanying text analysis). It then goes into a critique of current distant reading practices, discussing Ted Underwood, Nan Z. Da, to emphasize how these practices can often reproduce the critic's assumptions. This section also discusses the work of Johanna Drucker and Richard Jean So, emphasizing that their methods do a good job deconstructing social categories. While this deconstruction is important, I'm interested in analysis of text that disrupts what we know about these literary materials by producing new structures, or formalizations of these texts. Then, I go into a history of textual scholarship, focusing particularly on the work of Jerome McGann, Tanya Clement, and Katherine Bode, who offer a deformative and speculative understanding of critical analysis that is useful for my proposal. Then, I dip into Queer Theory, in particular Judith Butler's concepts of performativity and citation, which lend an understanding to the ways that critical processes can subvert dominant structures through iteration, or "performative citation." This notion of displacement through repetition is applied back to text analysis to illustrate how the iterative process of analyzing text can surface new textual structures that re-signify certain elements of that text. The chapter ends with my reading of Virginia Woolf's /Orlando/, to show how our understanding of "man" and "woman" in that text is re-signified through this kind of text analysis.

Next steps, is to continue to explore /Orlando/ and Moretti in Python (though not for too long) so I can write up this final section and the introduction.

Almost there!