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.
At a time when so much ink is being spilled on the problem of AI—the problem, even, of getting anyone to read an entire book, much less write about it—the fact that Vassar offered students the chance to revise and expand upon their coursework about great art seemed a rare gift; that more students wanted to do so than could be published, a giddying coup. Little did I know I’d be advising the entire endeavor four semesters later.
But what a joy this responsibility has been! (At least, aside from having to follow in Prof. Graham’s intimidating, formative footsteps.) Indeed, my collaboration with this volume’s editorial board for the six weeks of our intensive has been an ongoing exercise in intellectual delight and edification via quickening conversation no less than electrifying debate. Much of this dialogue was enabled by our extraordinary managing editor Zifeng Zhu, who will be—mark my words—a name to watch out for in the publishing industry. Just as galvanizing has been the time I’ve spent with the submissions we received, not just those that were ultimately selected by conversation and then consensus but every piece sent to me for our review. All of them reflected the impressive attention to argumentative nuance, aesthetic discernment, and audacious reimagining that are typical of many Vassar students and that make teaching here such a privilege.
Even so, certain choices had to be made, for an entire gambit of reasons. What we are left with, in the ninth volume of the VCJ, is a collection of seven essays that rescript the entire story of English literary history—and, for that matter, a great deal more. There is no single rubric or paradigmatic theme by which these pieces can be easily summed up. In fact, to proffer one here would be, necessarily, to contrive and contort. The methodological variety, theoretical sweep, and stylistic range of these essays deserve better than that.
Nevertheless, it’s worth highlighting a few throughlines before spotlighting each essay, in turn. Let’s start with the cover. Its riveting, polychromatic imagery, designed by our staffer Noah Duncan, features Matisse’s Girl with Green Eyes. In the subject’s incredible stare forward, against a kinetic background—in her bold habiliments: a red top and self-possessing blue hat—Noah finds an emblem for the central concerns of our authors. These include subjectivity and self-narration, visibility and vision; in many cases, life under a dominant gaze, especially for those in the margins. Sometimes, these figures are recentered by the works that our critics discuss; sometimes, they’re objectified all the more. Always, attention must be paid to the results (to borrow from Arthur Miller’s Linda Loman). Zifeng brilliantly begins this process in her subsequent note, which overviews our pieces as an exhortation to read on.
It would be easy to reflect, further, on how these essays speak to one another, though none of them was written in explicit dialogue with any of the others. (This is true even of those that engage with the same author.) But I’ll let you delve into the depths of these arguments yourselves, after the push that Zifeng delivers. That way, rather than being told about what I’ve dredged up for myself, you can find intellectual treasure of your own.
Let me leave you, instead, with a brief note about the cumulative effect of these essays—at least, on my mind. At a time of such upheaval and uncertainty, not only for the humanities but for higher education more broadly, these articles evoke sorely-needed feelings of optimism and resolve. That’s because, when taken together, they offer an important correction to one of the most pernicious misconceptions about literary study and the humanities today: our courses are laboratories for overt, explicit, (leftist) political indoctrination. That is, professors (like me) are training students in a pernicious and politically-motivated art. This art—whenever it’s invoked as anything more than a nebulous bogey—involves something like renouncing custom, tradition, and the status quo—really, normalcy of any and every kind—from a “predominant desire … to destroy rather than establish,” as Samuel Johnson once wrote of the poet John Milton. (As a refresher, Johnson was the great eighteenth-century man of letters and Milton [1608–74] wrote the magisterial epic Paradise Lost; he’s also a focus of my research.)
It’s true that, as the name of the humanities implies, coursework in these fields ennobles us to consider the coruscating complexities and ethical demands of the experience of being alive—less by gathering in a circle and talking about our feelings, however, than by attending closely to the aesthetic particulars that evoke these ambivalences and tensions to begin with. Do some professors explicitly bring their politics into the classroom, as a result? Sure. Do these politics tack in a progressive direction? Very possibly. (Which means I’m writing this introduction for them as much as for anyone else.) But I dare say that more of us are more concerned with empowering our students than refashioning them into our ideological image (though this image is hardly monolithic, from professor to professor, in the first place). We’re concerned, that is, with galvanizing students—and in the process, ourselves—to exempt no bit of received wisdom, no iota of common knowledge, no axiom or truism or platitude in our reading—however hallowed, by any cause or movement, whatever its political allegiance—from examination, intellectual scrutiny, and the questions of a curious critical mind.
Admittedly, this may mean that the object of inquiry—the aforementioned wisdom, institution, practice, belief, ideology, and so on—is in fact rejected or called into doubt. Then again, it may be nuanced or qualified to the benefit of all—or, indeed, reaffirmed, as happens to all great truths in the end. As none other than Milton exhorts in Areopagitica (1644), his early prose treatise against prepublication censorship, “Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” He poses the question with a sense that suppression leads mostly to unproductive radicalism and warier discontent. He had a sense, too, that allowing truth to be reaffirmed rather than inculcated makes it more convincing and compelling than before, especially to those reaffirming it. That’s because reaffirmation signals the reason of choice. A person who fails to exercise this faculty may even be “heretic in the truth,” Milton argues; his logic is that if someone hasn’t examined the thought process behind a view—if they haven’t adopted it of their own volition—their belief, however orthodox, in fact effects the harm of heresy. The problem, he realized, is that blithely clinging to preconceptions allows these beliefs to suppurate into “custom” and “superstition,” two of his favorite targets for rebuke, no less a concern in our age of rampant misinformation and confirmation bias than they were in his own. In holding us hostage to their ways, these forces obscure the truth instead of foregrounding it.
Yet, sorting reality from falsehood is a matter of more than denuding prevarication from the mere garb of reason. Once the obvious lies are caught out, a disconcerting fact becomes clear about the claims remaining: no single narrative or perspective ever conveys the entire truth, at least not in this, our fallen world. True, this invocation of postlapsarian nature might not be as persuasive now as it was four-hundred years ago. But I’ll be so bold as to say that even those who reject Milton’s Christianizing touches or normative ideas of mindedness—certainly, we should haggle with these—can appreciate the way he casts knowledge in metaphorical terms, as the body of the Egyptian god Osiris. Betrayed and ripped asunder, the deity was reputed to have been scattered across the globe so thoroughly that even his assiduous wife Isis couldn’t make him whole again. For Milton, though, it’s the effort that counts: our drive to work toward some veracity that coheres only by way of community, and across aisles of all kinds: in debate and disagreement—through dialogue rather than din. Milton would never have said this work is easy or comfortable—far from it: he was at one point imprisoned and feared for his life—but it is the lesson to which he returns most vehemently in every one of his major works, polemical and poetic alike.
I underscore the gist of this argument neither simply because Milton is my favorite poet nor because this volume omits mention of him (though he’s long been a focus in previous iterations of the journal); nor even due to the rousing all-night reading of Paradise Lost that the English Majors Committee hosted in April in the Vassar chapel. (Let’s call it a secular counterpart to the Bible studies I attended as a kid.) Rather, I highlight Milton’s ideal of dialogically driving toward truth because it perfectly captures the supreme achievement of these seven essays, in their careful engagement with other scholars and literary texts, in the questions they raise, the responses they provoke—and while I’d contest certain aspects of their arguments—the spur to thought that they kick into the flesh of our flanks. This all to say, the process of discussing, editing, and publishing these pieces puts me in mind of a more contemporary admonishment, from a recent New York Times column by Ezra Klein (which I add lest nothing from this century be cited): “To talk with others is to believe in the possibility of change—theirs and your own. Whether you like everything that someone has said should be severed from the question of whether that person is worth talking to.” That this much must be stressed suggests we still need Milton’s wisdom today.
It is in the spirit of his words that we’ve prioritized—more than any one stance—the following virtues: an equipoise of epistemological humility and provocative pluck; the seriousness of interpretive tenacity and openness, alike; introspection, retrospection, and care. May they not only animate you, dear reader, but the friends and family members—the mentors, relatives and associates, on this campus and in the wider world—with whom you share the volume in your hands or link in your browser. May the conversations begun in these pages continue; may the thoughtfulness spread; may we confront the looming issues, and big questions, collaboratively—with generosity, charity, nuance, and hope. It’s a great honor to have advised a publication that—to my mind—can show the way forward on all of these fronts, and more.
Pasquale Toscano, Ph.D.
Faculty Advisor
Poughkeepsie, NY
March 2026
Content
“Intention, Memory, and the Uncanny Rhetoric of Chaucer’s Pardoner” by Tucker Knoll
“‘Since I may choose’: Contested Desire in the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’” by Elia Smith
“‘Some of These Days’: Reclamation of Black Voices from Wheatley to Hughes” by Michelle M. MacKinnon
“Barthes’ Mythologies and Ideological Incoherence in Matisse’s Blue Nude” by Noah Duncan
“Narrative and Eternal Recurrence in Bataille’s Story of the Eye” by Miranda Chen
