Volume III, Issue 2 (Summer/Fall 2025)

Letter from the Editors

October 11, 2025

Disrupting Forms  

Welcome to the Summer/Fall 2025 issue of Ampersand: An American Studies Journal. In Fall 2024, we examined the sounds of resistance, taking inspiration from how Boston University’s striking graduate workers used noisemaking such as shouting, yelling, and the sonic to reimagine and rethink the fortifications of power. “Disrupting Form,” continues our interest in rupturing the assumed boundaries in American Studies and other related disciplines, such as literary history, visual culture, performance theory, film studies and archival studies. 

Rather than think of form as fixed, this issue embraces the multivalence and elasticity of “form,” and terms related to form such as “formlessness,” “formalism,” and “uni-form.” In part, the essays reimagine how knowledge is organized and articulated. We believe that critiquing concretized modes of thinking can enable coalition building, solidarity, and new ways to imagine collaboration that is both scholarly and intimate. 

Our issue begins with Basil Faris Dababneh’s “Transqueerying the Silly” which draws on Lauren Berlant and Jean Genet to articulate the ways that form and content are inseparable. Dabaneh explores the messy joyousness of a silly inquiry, and how it can splinter seriousness and all its serious forms. To transgress form is to get weirder, goofier, and also nonsovereign. Adam Kane takes nonsense seriously, examining how Edward Gorey’s form-defying picture stories play with what he terms comics language to challenge readers’ expectations for genre, plot, character, and even meaning. This “existential disruption,” he writes, serves as a “humorous reminder of life’s inexplicability.”

Ruth Kramer and Jan Maramot offer macro-level reimaginings of knowledge and its assumed boundaries. Kramer reconsiders institutional archives as a foundation for knowledge preservation and sharing. She identifies limitations – absences and silences, representational harm and the centering of suffering, practical failures of medium, and influence upon the archivist and institution – that have contributed to archival histories of violence and exclusion before exploring alternatives that reinforce communities and invite personal connections to the archive. Maramot, on the other hand, offers a new way of rethinking reading for literary analysis. Maramot suggests that slow reading is the “fundamental unit of how we understand literature.” Slow reading, he demonstrates, does not ask the reader to seek conclusions from a work but instead privileges the process and pleasure of reading itself. 

Natalie Salive reconstructs the complex and often contradictory life of Saint Mikhail Itkin, a influential figure in the gay liberation and alternative religious movements of the mid-to-late twentieth century. Salive‘s essay takes inspiration from the form of Early Christian hagiography to offer a queer hagiography – “a set of episodes that reveal the sacred contradictions of a man whose ministry was as political as it was spiritual.” Finally, we end our issue with Çisemnaz Çil’s examination of the the elliptical cinema of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011) and Lav Diaz’s From What Is Before (2014), using the filmmakers’ own devices — repetition, pause, and fragmentation — to reiterate how the filmmakers are disrupting the form of cinema to make meaning.

Volume III, Issue 2 (Summer/Fall 2025)

Basil Faris Dababneh, “Transqueerying the Silly” 

Adam Kane,  “About the Zote What Can Be Said? Edward Gorey, Nonsense, and Comics”

Ruth Kramer, “Archival Reflections: Disrupting History, Question Form, and Offering Alternative”

Jan Maramot, “Does Slow Reading Have a Form?”

Natalie Salive, “Sacred Mischief: Queerness, Hagiography, and the Unorthodox Life of Saint Mikhail Itkin”

Çisemnaz Çil, “No Argument, No Arrival: A Theory of Illegible Form in the Shadow of The Turin Horse and From What is Before”