Editorial Board
Faculty Advisor:
Dr. Katie Gemmill
Editors-in-Chief:
Rachel Ludwig ‘18
Kayla Miron ‘18
Student Editors:
Rachel Altemose ‘19
Gabriella Caballero ‘20
Evelyn Frick ‘19
Kimberly Nguyen ‘19
Elena Schultz ‘19
Andrea Yang ‘20
Letter from the Editors
Rachel Ludwig and Kayla Miron
Most papers written for Vassar College English classes find their permanent home in a folder inside a folder in the dark depths of the writer’s hard drive. Weeks of work and margins full of thoughtful comments from professors collect metaphorical dust as even the writer forgets the specifics of the paper. Now in its second year, the Vassar Critical Journal continues to provide a more enduring home for some of the best literary analysis that comes out of Vassar’s English department.
This project celebrates the work of Vassar’s talented writers and seeks to provide students with the opportunity to serve on an editorial board. It is our hope that the VCJ is a collaborative project among writers and editors in various stages of their academic careers.
Volume II of VCJ showcases writers from different class years and their work across a range of topics. This edition includes many voices and modes of inquiry. While all of our submissions demonstrated the skill and accomplishment of student writers, we selected work that went beyond the conventions of a well-written paper to ask compelling questions and expand our approaches to literary analysis and to the canon.
For the past two years, Professor Gemmill has championed this type of student-driven collaboration that is at the core of both the Vassar English department and the Vassar Critical Journal. Her critical eye and continued support have helped bring this journal to fruition. Her brilliance, compassion and enthusiasm for student work and engagement has shaped many Vassar student experiences both in and outside of the classroom.
We would also like to thank our team of student editors for their hard work and commitment to the journal. They are part of what makes the journal a collaborative effort and we appreciate the time they gave to see this journal into its second year.
We hope you enjoy reading it,
Kayla Miron ‘18 and Rachel Ludwig ‘18
Vassar College, May, 2018
Introduction
Katie Gemmill
I’d like to open this volume by inviting you to take a second and think about the word critic. What cloud of images, associations and related words forms in your mind?
Critic—critical—critique—criticism.
Do you feel the negative connotations creeping in, too? For me, the figure of the discerning, careful reader exercising their analytical faculties in conversation with an art work perpetually threatens to dissolve into the unhappier realm of harsh feedback, call-out culture, and reviews that reduce entire texts to their weakest features.
The skill set we spend so much time cultivating at Vassar—critical thinking—is at risk of getting a bad rap. On one hand, it’s becoming vulnerable to a growing anti-intellectual faction in this country, which propagates the idea that college students these days are snowflakes and navel gazers whose training doesn’t prepare them for the complex realities of the “real world.” On the other hand, those of us who regularly engage in academic discussions are familiar with the ways in which critique and one of its main corollaries—shame—can be weaponized.
Luckily, writers of the past can help orient us as we begin the work of carving out a constructive role for today’s young critics. Oscar Wilde, for instance, equates the critic with the artist, inviting us to see how interdependent our critical and creative faculties actually are. Then there’s W. H. Auden, who abhors a negative review (writing one is “bad for character”), and instead describes the critic’s role in terms of adding value: “convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work,” he urges; “give a reading of a work which increases my understanding of it,” and “throw light upon the relation of art to life.”[1]
The volume at hand is very much animated by this spirit of constructive, creative criticism. For starters, its editors-in-chief, Rachel Ludwig and Kayla Miron, have expertly guided their editorial board in delineating positive writerly qualities they want to reward with publication. One of these traits is readability: this new generation of thinkers wants a literary criticism that will not only appeal to academics, but also find its way back to a broader audience of interested readers.
For Auden, “a critic shows superior insight if the questions he raises are fresh and important.” All ten of the essays collected here by VCJ’s editorial board share this quality, and can be sorted into three groups based on the shape of their arguments. The first of these groups includes four essays that aim to break through conventional modes of seeing the world. Katerina Pavlidis’s nuanced reading of We the Animals demonstrates how author Justin Torres executes his decolonializing project, in part, by refiguring silence as an active and empowering presence, rather than a closeted or oppressive absence. Alan Gutierrez reads Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar as a rewriting of Homer’s The Odyssey, in which Jim Willard’s long and arduous search for a past lover who joined the navy resolves into a cautionary tale against idealizing straight-passing gay men. Similarly, Maria Bell explores how two queer mid-century modern novels, William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf and Fritz Peters’s Finistère, respectively dismantle the myth of the platonic romantic friendship of American boyhood. And lastly, focusing on Robin in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Abigail Hebert explores the rich possibilities presented by the figure of the prostitute as a sexual category that productively decouples sex from both romantic love and identity.
The next group of essays—comparatively smaller, but no less mighty—offers fresh intersectional feminist readings of old and new texts. Annie Shriver invites us to see an endorsement of creative, powerful and even magical female resistance embedded within the more broadly patriarchal narrative structure of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; and in Elena Janney’s reading of Sandra Cisneros’s “Never Marry a Mexican,” she exposes how feminine archetypes in Chicanx culture can not only limit women from claiming full, complex personhood, but can also engender ambivalence towards maternity.
Lastly, we have a group of essays that aim to complicate binary thinking of all kinds. Carinn Candelaria’s lyrical essay on Songs of Innocence and Experience explores William Blake’s shapeshifting poet speaker, arguing that his movements across the porous boundaries between his own identity and other, more feminized ones, helps him break down conventional moral binaries throughout this collection of poetry. Sarah Lederman borrows Friedrich Nietzsche’s pair of creative worldviews—the analytical Apollonian one, and the universalizing Dionysian one—and applies them within the context of Greek myth to describe the famously fluid figure of Tiresias. Sadie Frank shows us that the private persona of Clarissa and the public persona of Mrs. Dalloway are not separate, constant entities, but are rather fluidly constituted from a shared store of social anxieties, traits and responses. And finally, in the style of a classic explication de texte, Elena Schultz offers an analytical description of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s “L’École du diable,” highlighting its use of contrast to evoke philosophical questions about the ancient and the modern, the painful and the absurd, and the diabolic and the human.
These are only a few of the fine creations that have emerged from the crucible of Vassar English over the past year: we hope you enjoy what we’ve made!
Katie Gemmill
Vassar College
May 2018
[1] These and all following quotations are drawn from W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962).