Vassar Critical Journal – The Vassar College English Department Student Journal of Critical Essays

Current Issue Spring 2024

The 2024 Vassar Critical Journal boasts a strong contingent of essays on the speaking body, a configuration of signs, that can be read, misread, or reinterpreted. Zhiyue Ding offers a transformative reading of Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury through the lens of “crip time,” where the Compson family unit is seen to lag behind, dragging its proverbial foot, while modernity marches on. Chenxuan Hu takes issue with the critical predilection for presuming that Henry James’s protagonist in The American, Christopher Newman, is a cisgender straight white male. Privileging asexuality, she challenges both heteronormative expectations regarding “manifest sexuality” and queer readings, such as Eve Sedgwick’s, that equate the absence or ambiguity of a character’s sexuality with homosexuality. Read more

Editor’s Note

by Willem Doherty

To begin this edition of the Vassar Critical Journal, I’d like to, on the behalf of the Editorial Board, express a debt of gratitude to all of our contributors. Editorial work is often depicted as a slog, but the Board found no such tedium in our curation of this edition. We learned something from every essay we read, whether we accepted or rejected it, and the depth and breadth of our contributors’ interest and knowledge astounded us. Every step of the process, from initial evaluation to final editing, was a privilege for the team, especially the opportunity to work directly with our contributors, who were to-a-person gracious in regards to our suggestions. The result, we hope, is a journal that illuminates the work that inspired our contributors and ourselves, while expanding the frameworks and lenses through which this work is traditionally read.

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Cultural Distinction and Asexual Selfhood in Henry James’ The American

by Chenxuan Hu

In “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes a literary transition from the Frankensteinian paranoid Gothic hero to the figure of the closeted bourgeois bachelor, whose character is marked by relative independence from nuclear kinship, avoidance of genital sexuality, and emphasis on non-sexual sensory pleasures (192). Sedgwick attributes the pervasive male homosexual panic to the simultaneously compulsory and transgressive homosocial bonding under patriarchy. While Sedgwick’s analysis effectively combats the erasure of queerness in the reception of Henry James, many have taken issue with her direct translation of absent heterosexuality into homosexuality.

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Caves and Valleys: Grotesque Corporeality and Space in Frank Norris’ McTeague

by Bryn Marling

In Rabelais and His World, Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin describes the way in which early modern philosophy’s interest in the totality of the individual and demarcation of transcendent and physical aspects of Being reindexed the (grotesque) body as a cultural symbol. Medieval and Renaissance figurations of the body foregrounded the incompleteness expressed by its “eating, drinking, defecation…copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, and swallowing up by another body” (Bakhtin, 317). Such “interchange and interorientation” between the body and its environment debases the former and reveals its mortality (if the one can swallow, penetrate, and reproduce, one can also be swallowed, penetrated, and replaced) (Bakhtin, 317).

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Environmental Processes of Subjectivation in the ‘Proteus’ Episode of Ulysses

by Kai Speirs

Guattari admires Joyce’s cartography of the psyche because it recognizes and incorporates a heterogeneity of components in the production of subjectivity and subjects. In Chaosmosis and The Three Ecologies, Guattari’s “ecosophical” approach ties the study of subjectivity to ecological and political urgencies. The scope of this paper will not extend nearly far enough to examine all the processes of subjectivation present in Ulysses, for that is a project that would “keep the professors busy for centuries.” Instead, I am interested in how the natural environment is not only actively contemplated by Stephen, but rather contributes to the subjectivation of Stephen in ‘Proteus.’

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“Crip Time” for the Compsons: Reading the Compson Family as a Disabled Body in The Sound and The Fury

by Zhiyue Ding

By depicting Quentin’s experience of time as different from the natural rhythm of the sun or the pointers of clocks, Faulkner presents time as a subjective embodiment of lived experience rather than a universal measure, revealing how notions of normalcy and able-bodiedness are often embedded in the imagination of a singular, linear temporality. Disability scholar Alison Krafer is among the few who introduce the notion of “crip time,” suggesting that disabled people often experience time differently from able-bodied people, including needing “extra time to arrive or accomplish something,” along with having different views of “what can and should happen” in a given period of time (27).

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Look Who’s Talking: The Evolution of the Black Public Intellectual from Kelley to Smith

by Alexander Swift

In 1989, Trey Ellis introduced to the world the New Black Aesthetic (NBA), a Black artistic and cultural movement that “shamelessly borrows and reassembles across both race and class lines” (Ellis 234). Emerging out of and away from the essentializing, Black Power–inspired Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the late 60s and 70s, the New Black Aesthetic did not attempt to define Blackness, but instead allowed Blackness to speak for itself and embraced radical hybridity and individuality within the Black community. Within the decade, the NBA developed further into the political sphere with the New Intellectuals, defined by Robert Boynton in 1995 as a new collection of Black intellectuals, primarily gentile and rooted in American academia, who publicly debate the state of American society.

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