Letter from the Editors and Introduction
Letter From the Editors:
The Vassar Critical Journal was conceived of and established
during the 2016-2017 academic year, when we, as sophomores, had
just declared our major concentrations in English. The operation was
a small one, run mostly at the hands of the ever-capable former
academic intern for the English Department, Elizabeth Dean ’17.
Now, as we are so close to receiving our diplomas, having developed
as critical, literary thinkers and writers, it seems that the Journal has
matured with us. This year, the editorial board was as large as it has
ever been with eight editors. Moreover, our board was tasked with the
difficult process of reading, selecting, and editing a large variety of
essays, ranging from topics on Keats to science fiction. Putting
together this third edition of The Vassar Critical Journal has been a
feat months in the making; however, it serves as a wonderful capstone
to our time in the Vassar College English Department.
There are a few people we must acknowledge, without whom
this project would not have come together. This year, Dr. Erin
Sweany took on the role of The Vassar Critical Journal’s faculty
adviser and we could not have been more excited to have her onboard.
Dr. Sweany took a hands-on approach with the Journal, joining the
editorial board for meetings as well as largely contributing to the final
editing process; we were thrilled to have the opportunity to work so
closely with her and would like to thank her for all of her thoughtful contributions. Even though we will not be able to see Dr. Sweany
through the rest of her time at Vassar, she has been an incredible
addition to the English Department and we are excited to see how else
she will affect and inspire students on this campus.
Our editorial board members, who graciously took time out of
their busy schedules to engage critically and compassionately with
their peers’ writing, made the editorial process seamless with their
continuous enthusiasm. Each board member brought a unique and
valuable perspective that allowed this iteration of the Journal to
flourish into the publication before you. We are grateful to have had
the opportunity to get to know each of them better through this
project.
We would also like to thank Mr. Amodio, the chair of the
English Department, who has offered his continuous support for the
Journal since its inception, as well as Tracey Sciortino, who has
generously helped us with the logistics of running a student journal.
Thank you for reading,
Elena Schultz ’19 and Evelyn Frick ’19
Vassar College, May 2019
Introduction:
In an introduction to her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning
novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us:
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well
that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading,
believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we
may find—if it’s a very good novel—that we’re a bit different
from what we were before we read it, that we have been
changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a
street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just
what we learned, how we were changed.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artists whose medium is fiction does this in words. The
novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.1
The essays selected by the student editorial board for the 2019 edition
of the Vassar Critical Journal reflect, in a variety of ways, Le Guin’s
points about both the transformative power of literature and the
capaciousness of literary language. The essays contained in this
volume engage with transformations of bodies, identities, hierarchal
systems, genres, attitudes, abilities, and beliefs. They frequently do so
by interrogating the language of sensory experience found in their
primary sources, considering how words can evoke embodied
experiences that serve themes of transformation.
Transformations pervade the analyses included in this volume.
The transforming and transformative identities of black women are
explored in Andrea Everett’s essay on race, identity, and performance
in Nella Larsen’s novel Passing; in Maria Bell’s investigation of
writing as a tool of the white patriarchy but deployed by black
women, via writing in the epistolary mode, to claim agency; and in
Nick Erichson’s essay on musical silence as a powerful black female
voice in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora. Transformation as a
threatening force imposed by colonial powers is everywhere
acknowledged, but most especially in Gerardo J. Lamadrid’s analysis
of the religiously overzealous community leader Davie in V.S. Reid’s
novel about Jamaica’s resistance to Crown rule (New Day) and Max
DuBois’s exploration of the distinction between the categories of
body and flesh in the oppressive, racialized cultural hierarchy in
Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts. Lamadrid and DuBois
both insightfully analyze the ways in which their primary texts
represent systems of oppression that are reenacted within oppressed
communities. Ben Papsun insists that we acknowledge that genre
conventions can transform in his argument that there is a modern
blues aesthetic in Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones, an
aesthetic that transcends the violence that scholars have claimed
underscores the blues aesthetic. Gelsey White argues that poetry is a
transformative force on geography itself in her comparison of Derek
Walcott’s and Langston Hughes’s poems that grapple with
waterscapes as historical mechanisms of oppression of black bodies,
but also as a fluid medium that has belonged and does belong just as
much to Caribbean and African American cultures as it has been claimed as belonging to white colonizer cultures. Last but not least
within this theme of transformation is Stephen Jin’s meditation on
what is perhaps the biggest transformation of all: life to death. In John
Keats’s poem “To Autumn” and the fact of the poet’s early death
from tuberculosis, Jin sees Keats coming to terms with death as a
natural part of life and even with its potential to be a peaceful
transition.
The second theme that unites these essays is the ability of
literature to express those experiences that are outside of language (to
paraphrase Le Guin). Sensory language is, of course, a core tool of
metaphor, as all of the included essays demonstrate. But the sound of
language is often overlooked in our highly literate culture, because the
primary way we encounter literature is visually. This is quite the
reverse of reading practices in the Middle Ages, when texts were
typically read aloud to groups of people. It is generally accepted by
medieval scholars that even the lone medieval reader probably spoke
a text aloud as they read it—simultaneously seeing and hearing it. As
a medievalist, I was unprepared for but delighted that Andrea Yang
and Sam Panken find this merging of textuality, orality, and aurality
in the modernist novels of James Joyce (Ulysses) and Gertrude Stein
(Tender Buttons). Yang analyzes the embodiment of sound in
characterization in Ulysses, and especially in the sex and relationship
anxieties of protagonist Leopold Bloom. Panken finds a queer
perspective in “BREAKFAST” that is especially apparent when the
text is read aloud, revealing Stein’s willingness to play with the
relationship between seeing words and hearing them.
It is delightful to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel this diverse array of
literature through the perspectives provided in these essays. These
student authors demonstrate the bravery to think independently,
engage in academic conversations with secondary sources, and
grapple with themes that are both intellectually and emotionally
difficult. The range of texts, experiences, and perspectives engaged
with in this collection of essays makes this edition of the Vassar
Critical Journal a paean to the transformative power of literature, a
power that applies not only to readers, as Le Guin highlights, but also
to itself. We see in these essays that literature as an idea is an
inclusive one and literature instruction as a practice is at its most
productive when that is acknowledged in the intellectual opportunities
with which students are provided.
While credit for the work of idea development, drafting, and
revising that produces essays like the ones in this volume lies
primarily with these insightful student writers, some credit should go
to the Vassar faculty who design classes that provide students with the
environments and guidance to explore personal literary interest and
grapple with difficult ideas. I was reminded of this by contributor
Gerardo J. Lamadrid who concludes their essay with thanks for the
presence of “a dedicated Caribbeanist in Vassar’s faculty” in
Professor Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert whose class Crossings:
Literature without Borders was the generating space for Lamadrid’s
essay. Furthermore, several of the essays in this volume were the
product of a single class: Professor Eve Dunbar’s Black and Blues:
Blues as Metaphor in African American Literature. This seminar
resulted in essays that ask us to listen to the music in text, to read text
as music, and attend to black American experiences as expressed in
both literature and blues music.
It is a privilege to interact daily with Vassar students, to share
their excitement about literature, and dwell with their thoughtful
reflections about serious issues and questions. As a literature
professor it is a regular occurrence to read a provocative thesis
statement, an incisive close-reading, or a successful revision. I rarely
get to share these triumphs, however. I am privileged to read all of
this writing, all of these perspectives, I get to be transformed by it; but
its transformative potential is limited by the fact that it is often a work
in progress, and part of the work is the development of the writer
themselves. I am glad that the Vassar Critical Review exists as a place
where some of these works can be collected and presented, ready to
transform their audiences, as they have transformed their authors in
the writing of them. May you be transformed by them.
My thanks go out to the dedicated editorial board of the
Vassar Critical Journal: Nicholas Barone (’19), Maria Bell (’19),
Gabriella Cabellero (’20), Max DuBois (’20), Andrea Everett (’20),
Abigail Hebert (’20), Haley Hill (’19), and Ben Papsun (’20). On top
of all of their other college, work, and life responsibilities, these
students solicited, collected, evaluated, and finalized the essays for
this volume. They sent out both the happy acceptance e-mails and the
more difficult rejection e-mails. They have done the work of design,
layout, and formatting. I especially applaud the leadership of Editors-
in-Chief Elena Schultz (’19) and Evelyn Frick (’19), both of whom read every single submission, suggested revisions for the authors whose work was chosen for publication, and tirelessly assisted me
with my own revision recommendations. I thank the editors-in-chief
and the editorial board for including me in this process.
Erin E. Sweany
Vassar College
April 29, 2019