Editor’s Note

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. It was just such engagement that, through clashes and coalescence, gave rise to the critical lens and creative vitality that not only define our journal but also encapsulate our vigorous intellectual community at Vassar.

The 2026 issue of the Vassar Critical Journal is—to echo Miranda Chen’s and James Faulkner’s perceptive explorations of Bataille’s novella Story of the Eye—an eye that travels through time, breaks boundaries, and transcends dimensions; an eye that confronts the gaze of others and asserts a perspective of its own. We begin and conclude the issue with two couplets, or pairs of essays on the same literary text and subject matter. Tucker Knoll and Elia Smith offer us a vista into the medieval past and highlight throughlines of human character, by re-examining Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, while Chen and Faulkner guide our sight to the jarring scene of modernity by tracing the metatextual existence of narrative and language. This symmetrical establishment of the issue’s key themes sets the stage for a diverse combination of socially relevant observations. Michelle M. MacKinnon traces the evolution of vision and visibility among Harlem Renaissance writers as they combat racism and logics of racialization. Noah Duncan scrutinizes the mystifying gaze of Matisse’s images as they re-present the colonial subject. Jayla Anderson discerns the omnipresent surveilling eye behind the performative and voyeuristic forces in the gendered spectacle of the theatrical arena. The myriad lenses, variously alternating within the neat “bookends” of comparative approaches, serve as a microcosm of our principles and experiences in editing the journal. These experiences combined resonance and discord, consensus and dispute. They set us on a dazzling quest into the infinite ground of connection and contrast, firmly directed by the search for high quality and original voice.

To echo Professor Toscano, this is an age bombarded with misinformation, fabrication, and indoctrination, when emerging technologies and mass media have subjected our conception of reality to an unprecedented threat. Rather than quail in the face of these difficulties, we feel obliged to reaffirm and reclaim the need to see. It is our honor to present the Vassar Critical Journal as a medium for this kind of seeing, or perception—to use a more capacious, less physically normative term—with the awareness that to think critically and independently is what the discipline of the humanities has taught us. As soon as you meet the glimmering green eyes of Matisse’s portrait, we cordially invite you to embark on a journey of appreciating the beauty of literary visions and, through discernment, declare your very own presence.

Thank you for reading. Enjoy the collection.

Sincerely,

Zifeng Zhu ’28
Managing Editor