The
original novel tells the story of Freya Roth and is a warning of the rising
German fascist state at the cusp of World War II and the Holocaust, emphasizing
the dangers of the Nazi machine that brings destruction and defies humane
principles. By altering the spatial organization of the text while preserving
the placement of text relative to its original location along a line of text, I
was able to create a physical and metaphysical space among the text, indicating
a gently sloping path beyond good and evil that Freya was experiencing as she
skied through the mountain slopes. I reordered the text chronologically
backward to start the piece with the theme: beyond good and evil. I also
isolated certain elements of nouns and verbs to highlight the hard, cruel,
exacting nature of artificial manmade goods in juxtaposition with the fine
quality of nature and what lies beyond manmade phenomena. Finally, I added
typographical elements such as punctuation and prepositions in order for the
piece to make grammatical s

In my
own deformance piece inspired by Kabe Wilson’s work, I reconstituted a one-paragraph
excerpt from Phyllis Bottome’s Mortal
Storm into a poetic form that utilizes space as a tool for conveying
messages of transcendence beyond good and evil as well as the stark
juxtaposition of the hardness of material objects and the ethereal lightness of
what lies beyond the darkness of material reality.

Deformance,
according to Samuels & McGann (1999), is a mode of interpretation that
breaks the mold of traditional conceptual analysis and enters an alternate form
of performative and imaginative art. In Emily Dickinson’s example of
deformance, Backward Reading allows us to see her poetic work in a new light
and gain a deeper appreciation for the thematic messages and focal points. Kabe
Wilson’s work is intriguing because she cuts up the pieces of Virginia Woolf’s
story and presents an artistically reconstructed and performative piece that
illustrates the cultural and societal changes that have brought to bear since Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own was published in
1929.