A paraphrase is an inherently abject text: it has famously been excoriated as a very bad way to do criticism, and it is seen as a secondary and low-status kind of writing. Nevertheless, or therefore, its very abjection can give us new ways to think about what we do when we read poetry. In this plenary talk, Guy Bray suggests that thinking about the queerness of paraphrase can help us to think about the queerness of all textuality.

With funding support from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.