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

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Vassar Critical Journal – The Vassar College English Department Student Journal of Critical Essays
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Current Issue: Spring 2026

The moment I first learned of the Vassar Critical Journal is as finely etched in my mind as the presidential face on a freshly minted coin. This is saying something because it was more than two years ago now. Certainly, I recall what I was wearing—a blue dress shirt, orange tie, gray slacks, corduroy jacket—and who shared this vital part of the English curriculum with me: the previous advisor, Prof. Wendy Graham. We were sitting in her Chair’s Office, on the ground floor of Sanders Classroom, in one of the first events of my two-day campus visit for the position I currently hold. While discussing the English major, Prof. Graham mentioned the VCJ. “What’s that,” I asked, naturally enough. “It’s a student journal,”she replied, “that’s dedicated to publishing critical essays, about books, visual art, music—you name it—but essays written by students themselves.” My response was stertorous, the words effusive—not just to get a job but to register true enthusiasm that such a thing exists on a college campus today. Read more

Editor’s Note

by Zifeng Zhu

I can remember how I walked out of Sanders Classroom into a snowy dusk, with excitement sparkling inside me, after attending my initial Vassar Critical Journal review session in my first year of college; little did I know that I would have the fortune to be involved in the production of the VCJ for another year. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to everyone involved with this year’s journal, and especially to our faculty advisor, Professor Pasquale Toscano, whose generous openness and tremendous enthusiasm provided us cherished support. It has been my utmost privilege to collaborate with our resourceful and dedicated editorial board, whose sharp insights into literature and keen taste for writing illuminated our selection, curation, and editorial process. It has also been a great joy to witness our editors’ thoughtful engagement with the considerable ingenuity of our contributors.

Intention, Memory, and the Uncanny Rhetoric of Chaucer’s Pardoner

by Tucker Knoll

Perhaps no other Chaucerian pilgrims have fascinated critics as much as the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner. The allure of the Wife’s vitality is clear to most readers, even to Chaucer himself, who evidently saw the Wife as an authority on marriage and sexuality, referencing her in his short “L’Envoy de Bukton.” But what are we to make of the Pardoner, a figure more akin to Goethe’s Mephistopheles—a spirit of negation, who delights in bringing men into flache Unbedeutenheit, insipid meaningless—than any other pilgrim in The Canterbury Tales? In the highly subjective realm of the Tales’ storytelling competition, Chaucer would likely agree with Nietzsche’s dictum that es gibt keine Tatsachen, sondern nur Interpretationen—there are no facts, only interpretations—and he endows these two diametrically opposed pilgrims with the greatest strength of (mis)interpretative power.

“Since I may choose”: Contested Desire in the “Wife of Bath’s Tale”

by Elia Smith

The inimitable Wife of Bath has fascinated and frustrated Chaucer, his pilgrims, and generations of their scholars perhaps more comprehensively than any other figure in the great poet’s oeuvre. Chaucer initially intended to attribute the “Shipman’s Tale” to the Wife, but later expanded her role in the text by swapping a bawdy fabliau for a romance that confronts the social problem of rape (Silverman). He also cites her in the poem “L’Envoy de Bukton,” which recommends that its recipient refer to the Wife of Bath’s words for guidance on marriage (Weever). These incidents demonstrate Chaucer’s serious interest in the Wife of Bath and the questions she raises in her prologue and tale. Suzanne Edwards describes the debate around the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” as centered on “whether Chaucer’s desire or the Wife’s desire is at work in the text” (Edwards 23). Both in the tale and in its scholarly readings, desire diverges along gendered lines.

“Some of These Days”: Reclamation of Black Voices from Wheatley to Hughes

by Michelle M. MacKinnon

The stories of the Harlem Renaissance—roughly from 1910 to 1937—and those of its precursors trace a movement toward the resumption of national identity for Black Americans, as the promise of Reconstruction and repair remained unfulfilled fifty years after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Preceding Harlem, literary, scholarly, and cultural producers inaugurated a canon of public expression, even as Black authorship continually negotiated the problem of voice under surveillance within systems of oppression. Following the Great Migration (1910–40), population concentration in New York facilitated the Harlem Renaissance as a site of exchange and arrival for a long-deferred sense of cultural belonging. From the trailblazing poetics of Phillis Wheatley, who navigated the tension between public authorship and protection over a century-and-a-half earlier, to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s rondeau of protective performance and Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” in 1925, what had become most visible for the “New Negro” was that earlier strategies of masking had become apparently old.

Barthes’ Mythologies and Ideological Incoherence in Matisse’s Blue Nude

by Noah Duncan

Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra) (Fig. 1), done in 1907, is a physically imposing painting and is full of contradiction. It is large, nearly life-sized. Its old, golden-brown frame signifies antiquity, as does its subject, a classically posed female nude. As such, Blue Nude exists in a Western lineage stretching back to Greece and Rome. As a supposed portrait of a “primitive” colonial subject, moreover, it gestures towards an idealized human nature preceding civilization itself. And yet, Blue Nude’s technical heterogeneity and absolute rejection of naturalistic color mark it quite clearly as a product of a new and reckless avant-garde—of a modernism which, in 1907, worked to transcend the project of art as representation. Blue Nude foregrounds its paintedness, and the forms built up by that paint defy conventional relationships with perspective, with color, and most importantly, paradoxically, with Western tradition itself.

Studies in Surveillance: Sarrasine’s Operatic Veil and La Rosalía’s Pop Persona Through Exhibitionism and Scopophilia

by Jayla Anderson

When studying a new language, one soon discovers that direct translations are elusive. Idioms, words, and sensibilities in one language are not guaranteed to exist or have the same meaning in another. The same can go for any form of expression, including the artistic. A painting is an artist’s translation, created from their viewpoint, of something that exists outside of themselves. A composition is a musician’s sonic translation of a feeling or moment. These artistic modes of expression are gestures reflecting the essence of something, rather than a clear copy-and-paste of the thing itself. Moreover, when art is shared, an additional layer of translation emerges through interpretation. Art is the sole point of connection between artist and consumer, and interpretation is a fixed process in art consumption, as though the art is fed through a fine net and emerges shaped a little differently than before. This relationship between artist and consumer can become one of imagined familiarity, as both perspectives work together to create a finished work in a consumer’s mind.

Narrative and Eternal Recurrence in Bataille’s Story of the Eye

by Miranda Chen

“The […] hero [of the quest narrative] is generally conceived of as going into the darkness to retrieve the light and achieve a meaningful existence,” claims modernist scholar Paul Sheehan (159). If that is true, then Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928) reads like the quest narrative’s inverse: the unnamed narrator descends into filth, procuring an existence ostensibly devoid of meaning. Like monomaniacs, the narrator and his friend Simone stage a scene with similar elements—a white globular object and a luminous liquid—over and over again. Although the narrator and Simone appear to lack an objective, their story continually forges onward and thus has both motility and an underlying purpose. Critics have made a connection between Story of the Eye’s narrative and pornography (Boulter 153). However, Bataille’s narrative also issues from key philosophical problems—most significantly those posed by Friedrich Nietzsche, of whom Bataille was a prolific scholar and critic. Thus, a deeper evaluation of narrative form in Story of The Eye with respect to its philosophical theory is necessary.

Filthy Words: The Heterological and Linguistic Significance of Bataille’s Story of the Eye

by James Faulkner

Cunt, Cock, Fuck, Jizm, Piss. Such are Georges Bataille’s favorite words in Story of the Eye, where filthy language is the privileged mode of expression. The most shocking and reviling moments in Story of the Eye are undoubtedly those that center these word-images of filth: Bataille and his characters find orgiastic delight in excreting these words from their mouths, soiling the tabula rasa of each page with a word vomit of repugnant images. While the prudish reader might reduce Bataille’s fascination with filthy words to mere perversion or a lack of sophistication, I instead argue that Bataille’s employment of obsceniities is a sophisticated linguistic act of rebellion against society’s normative assumptions about what characterizes a literary text. The core of my argument launches off this point, where, blending diachronic (philology) and synchronic (structural) linguistics, psychoanalysis, and narratology, I will demonstrate that Bataille’s fascination with language is intrinsically related to his theory of Heterology—the science of the Other, the wasted, the accursed.