What Do You Get When A Literary Theorist Reads The US Constitution?

You get, for instance, a “focus on the connotations of what Hamilton in 1788, now thinking of ‘politics by analogy to architecture,’ called the ‘erection of a new government.’ This is a pity, but for a literary scholar … the image of ‘erection’ is too tempting to resist.” Or you get the suggestion that the issue of slavery and human rights is “more legible and meaningful when seen in the context of aesthetic disputes over neoclassicism.”