Inspired by Gretchen Henderson’s novel Galerie de Difformité, each student in “The Future of Fiction: Literature from Print to Touchscreen” (Spring 2018) chose one of the texts we read during the semester and produced a creative “deformance” of their selection. Each student also wrote a critical essay explaining how the transformative choices they made were rooted in their reading of the text as both a literary work and a media artifact.
Students created a range of deformances, from book art to collage to illustration to audio. Students were also asked to consider how they would curate their creation for display in a gallery, including documenting, titling, and briefly explaining their project.
The gallery of their final projects is below.
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“Dictionary as Deformance” by Brittney Chamberlain
(deformance of Galerie de Difformité by Gretchen Henderson)
“As we were reading through Galerie, I often thought of plants and how they fit in to the subject of deformity. I thought of wildfires and how they scorch the landscape, killing all the trees, and deform it into black nothingness. But the plants are able to grow back, despite being deformed and destroyed. I also felt that there was a certain irony in turning a book, made from who knows how many killed trees, into a planter and giving it new life by planting some succulents in it. It’s an irony I felt that was in the spirit of Galerie.
I wanted to use Galerie de Difformité itself for the book planter. However, Galerie is rather small. It’s not a thick enough book to make a good planter. So I went to the D.I. and sifted through the books there until I found one that was both thick enough and went along with the theme of destruction. I chose a dictionary. The dictionary was thick enough and I found another irony in using a dictionary, a keeper of all these words, deemed to be the English language’s greatest achievement, and destroying it by cutting a giant hole through it.”
“Box of Madness” by Plutarco
(deformance of “The Right Sort” by David Mitchell)
“A story is a story, and that is all anyone focuses on, but what happens after the story has ended? My deformance focuses on merging ideas from the old account with new plans to create a different story of those affected and left behind in the original one. I chose ‘The Right Sort’ because it lends itself well to deformation and to continue the story. I wanted to explore the visual elements threaded throughout the narrative that invites the reader to imagine the scenes to implement in a new tale. I used snippets of the original story as a base to create visual panels of the iconic scenes throughout the text. I used a variety of art mediums to create distorted boards being relayed by way of an original character in the new story. My deformance is two parts. The first part takes the audience inside the mind of an original character left behind who is trying to tell a story about a traumatic event through her eyes in the panels created. The second part is a letter from a new character from the implied narrative that is never told that was affected by the original story and trying to make sense in the aftermath.”
“House of Leaves – Audio” by William Clarke
(deformance of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski)
“House of Leaves is such an interesting text that if you were looking to deform it you would have no shortage of ways to go about it. For me, I decided to try my hand at making a sort of audiobook version of House of Leaves, or at the very least, do a small section of the piece as more of a proof of concept in a way. I decided to do this audio version because I was intrigued by the challenge of it. The question, how would you even convey what happens on the page in House of Leaves with audio, was one that drew me in the more I thought about it. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, with the weird and outlandish way that House of Leaves is formatted, it’s unique and almost impossible to fully translate into different media, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.”
“Storyboard of House of Leaves” by Shondra T. Ekenstam (aka RainRiverMusic)
(deformance of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski)
“I created a storyboard for House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danelewski. The storyboard was for if the book became a television or movie series. I want to do this because I liked the idea of how the book would look if it were to be show on a screen. I created two scenes for the book. I came to the conclusion that a character would need to be created that does not exist in the novel to investigate Johnny Truant. The reason for this is because Johnny leaves message, clues, and symbols throughout the book, so another character must be created to investigate Johnny or those clues he leaves would be useless. The first scene is of this original character investigating Johnny and the story he wrote. However, the second seen focuses on Navidson. It is the last scene in which the reader see him in. A foreboding seen which causes the reader to question what really happened to Davidson.”
“Avec un Peu de Temps (With a Little Time)” by Abby Musgrove
(deformance of Arcadia by Iain Pears)
“In Arcadia, during Angela’s time in Paris she has an epiphany while reading La Cousine Bette, in which she realizes that Balzac not only ‘transferred reality into his imagination” but also “transferred his imagination to reality’ (Pears). The idea follows along the same lines as Angela’s theory about time, in which time is like a string and if any part of the string moves, both ends (past and present) must adjust to accommodate the change. This concept also holds true for literature and reality. Reality can be changed by literature just as literature is influenced by reality. I was inspired by Angela’s musing on time and literature and this is the embodiment of that concept. You create your story and transfer your imagination to reality. By placing your story in the box, it will be.”
“Exploration of YOU” by MG
(deformance of Galerie de Difformité by Gretchen Henderson)
“I noticed that this book is very much physical. Not only in the sense that it is a printed book, but in the idea that the body is a theme that shows up on almost every page. This got me thinking about how the anatomy of a book is modeled after the anatomy of a human body. There are also themes of self-awareness. What better way to be self-aware than to write words on your body? I wanted the exhibits to be the parts of the body that you use to manipulate and read literature in any form, whether it be printed literature or otherwise. Towards the end of the book, there is a page called Exhibit U. This is a blank page except for the header and the line ‘fill in the blank’. I chose to put this page in my deformance with a picture of myself. This is symbolic to me because Galerie is a book where you get what you give. You have to find your own meaning within the text, otherwise it is just a bunch of random pages put together. Putting parts of the book on my body is representing ME. I wanted to physically put a picture of me in my deformance, because my project was the meaning that I personally got out of the text.”
“A Never Ending Staircase” by H. R. Burton
(deformance of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski)
“My deformance project was about how to portray the staircase in House of Leaves. I thought of many options like recreating the staircase in a box, or recreating the book itself to make the penrose staircase (which is the never ending staircase allusion). As I was cutting up the book in this staircase formation I realized that that was not what I should do. So I cut the pages to create a hollow book or a book safe, where the book looks like a normal book on the outside but it is hollow on the inside and one could put something inside it. I decided to put a depiction of the blue house and the staircase inside that hole. The house is in the center and the stairs are encompassing it to create the illusion that the staircase is swallowing up the house and its inhabitants. I also colored the edges of the hollow part to symbolize both the house again, and that Danielewski put blue squares in the book to represent the house.”
“Deforming Me” by JW
(deformance of Galerie de Difformité by Gretchen Henderson)
“As you look at the project, you can see that there are tiny scraps of paper embedded in my outline that seem random, but this is not the case. Every single scrap in my project is from the pages that I choose to put inside my body. They are the left over parts of the page that would not fit, but still were a part of the book. I thought it was important to add these scraps because they were a part of the path I chose as well. They represent the white space of the book that is still relevant to the story, even though there are no words on the page. I am not an artistic person at any means, but I was extremely happy with the outcome of my project. Galerie is about deformance and making the book your own and I did just that in my own kind of way. It may not be what the book asked of us as readers, but it was my own deformance of Galerie made into myself.”
Julia Panko - Literature & Media 