This seminar invites participants to identify a consequential misunderstanding in literary studies, critical theory, or philosophy and to explain what has gone wrong, what is at stake in correcting it, and what it means to claim the authority to do so. We are concerned less with the potential productivity of misprision than with genuine instances of misapprehension, misconstrual, or distortion—whether resulting from naivety or bad faith—that can be demonstrated through textual, historical, linguistic, or logical evidence. Papers might reconstruct the original force of a concept or argument, trace the history of its reception and transmission, examine the polemical uses to which a familiar misrepresentation has been put, or show how an error of quotation, translation, attribution, contextualization, or inference has become established as disciplinary knowledge.

We are especially interested in misunderstandings that cannot be explained simply by inattention or carelessness. What disciplinary habits, political investments, ideological commitments, or material conditions of transmission allow an error to emerge or persist after contrary evidence has become available? When does misinterpretation become a condition of a concept’s circulation, enabling it to travel precisely by reducing its complexity? How can we distinguish misunderstanding from disagreement, critique, or deliberate appropriation? And when does the demand for correction itself risk policing analysis, foreclosing revision, or claiming hermeneutic ownership over a contested term?

Although our focus is on how and why misconstruals arise and endure, participants need not limit themselves to defending an idea against its misapplication or abuse. They may also examine how a misunderstanding has impacted its object and reshaped its discursive environment through the debates it has organized, the exclusions it has licensed, or the disciplinary interests it has served. Once an error has been established, its persistence may expose a genuine problem, a contradiction, or a limit in the concept itself.