October 11, 2025<\/p>\n
Disrupting Forms\u00a0\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
Welcome to the Summer\/Fall 2025 issue of<\/span> Ampersand: An American Studies Journal<\/span><\/i>. In Fall 2024, we examined the sounds of resistance, taking inspiration from how Boston University\u2019s striking graduate workers used noisemaking such as shouting, yelling, and the sonic to reimagine and rethink the fortifications of power. \u201cDisrupting Form,\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Rather than think of form as fixed, this issue embraces the multivalence and elasticity of \u201cform,\u201d and terms related to form such as \u201cformlessness,\u201d \u201cformalism,\u201d and \u201cuni-form.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Our issue begins with <\/span>Basil Faris Dababneh<\/b>\u2019s \u201cTransqueerying the Silly\u201d<\/span> 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.<\/span> Adam Kane<\/b> takes nonsense seriously, examining how Edward Gorey\u2019s form-defying picture stories play with what he terms <\/span>comics language<\/span><\/i> to challenge readers\u2019 expectations for genre, plot, character, and even meaning. This \u201cexistential disruption,\u201d he writes, serves as a \u201chumorous reminder of life\u2019s inexplicability.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Ruth Kramer <\/b>and <\/span>Jan Maramot<\/b> offer macro-level reimaginings of knowledge and its assumed boundaries. <\/span>Kramer <\/b>reconsiders institutional archives as a foundation for knowledge preservation and sharing. She identifies limitations \u2013 absences and silences, representational harm and the centering of suffering, practical failures of medium, and influence upon the archivist and institution \u2013 that have contributed to archival histories of violence and exclusion before exploring alternatives that reinforce communities and invite personal connections to the archive. <\/span>Maramot, <\/b>on the other hand, offers a new way of rethinking reading for literary analysis. Maramot suggests that <\/span>slow<\/span><\/i> reading is the \u201cfundamental unit of how we understand literature.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Natalie Salive <\/strong>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<\/strong>‘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, w<\/span>e end our issue with <\/span>\u00c7isemnaz \u00c7il<\/b>\u2019s examination of the the elliptical cinema of B\u00e9la Tarr\u2019s <\/span>The Turin Horse <\/span><\/i>(2011) and Lav Diaz\u2019s <\/span>From What Is Before <\/span><\/i>(2014), using the filmmakers\u2019 own devices \u2014 repetition, pause, and fragmentation \u2014 to reiterate how the filmmakers are disrupting the form of cinema to make meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n Basil Faris Dababneh<\/b>,\u00a0\u201cTransqueerying the Silly\u201d<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Adam Kane<\/b>, “About the Zote What Can Be Said? Edward Gorey, Nonsense, and Comics”<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Ruth Kramer<\/b>, “Archival Reflections: Disrupting History, Questioning Form, and Offering Alternative”<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Jan Maramot<\/b>, “Does Slow Reading Have a Form?”<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Natalie Salive<\/strong>, “Sacred Mischief: Queerness, Hagiography, and the Unorthodox Life of Saint Mikhail Itkin”<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nVolume III, Issue 2 (Summer\/Fall 2025)<\/h2>\n