Just wanted to take a minute to thank you all for your excellent work on the third blog post. Literally every single one of you is showing impressive effort, and it’s exciting to see you writing your way towards increasing clarity and master of these often abstract and difficult texts.

As before, I wanted to highlight a couple of authors who really crushed it this time. As always, I’m not ranking here or laying out a template for others to follow, but just shining a light on a couple of the many posts I found insightful:

• Sofia’s post really embodies the ludic (>Latin, ludus, “play” or “game”) aspects of deconstruction as a critical mode with her self-reflexive riff on different ways of reading Johnson reading Melville. Really fun but also really on-point in terms of understanding what’s going on.
• Rich helps us to see de Saussure’s fingerprints all over Barthes’s reading of photographs. Really crystalline example of structuralism from “under the hood.”
• James’s post bravely plunges into the latter part of Johnson’s argument as she examines how Melville has us “judge judgment” through the figure of Vere.