Spring 2025
This is my final term as faculty advisor to the Vassar Critical Journal intensive. I am handing off the role to Assistant Professor of Early Modern and Disability Studies Pasquale Toscano, who will surely attract a different pool of student editors and contributors, bringing the Vassar Critical Journal to the attention of a new, in addition to its customary, audience. Readers see only the finished product. The work that goes into selecting, editing, and publishing the Journal takes place behind the scenes. In my six years as faculty advisor, I have greatly enjoyed working with students, watching them exercise critical judgement, debate and resolve their differences, both with each other and with me, and come up with the best possible selection and arrangement of material. In most cases this is the first editorial responsibility for student-editors, and they have invariably approached the task at hand with high seriousness, humility, and fairness. They have listened carefully and respectfully to each other and read with attention and discernment. I have taken the position that the Journal should publish essays that push the envelope and, in that way, demonstrate to readers the art of the possible. Sometimes that means that published essays will require a second reading, particularly when the authors and books discussed and critical approaches employed are unfamiliar to the reader. Hopefully, this selection of topics will encourage students to approach course selection with a wide-angle lens. Two of our essays began as papers for the Virginia Woolf seminar; two for the American Literary Realism Seminar; one for Transnational Literature. Despite the concentration of essays from particular seminars, we have no thematic or content preferences, beyond the expectation that essays will be smart, original and well written. Revising an essay that originated in conversation with class discussion and paper prompts for a general audience requires work on the part of the editors and contributors alike. The 2025 editorial collective and our contributors have done a superb job in preparing these essays for publication. I’d like to single out for commendation our Managing Editor, Charlotte Robertson, and our Art Editor, Be Hill, who designed the front and back covers.
Among the fun to be had in sampling essays from the same course was our discovery that Kai Spiers and Jaden Schapiro had each selected a different character from the novel The Waves as the key to Woolf’s philosophy. In “‘Effort and the Struggle’: Heroic Cycles in Bernard’s Final Soliloquy,” Speirs contends that: “It is this heroic struggle against complacency, against stupor and conformity, and most importantly against potentially crippling grief and fear of death that characterizes Bernard’s soliloquy. It is also Woolf’s experience with grief which ‘unveiled and intensified’ her alienation from her privileged background and inheritance of ‘British civilization’.” In contrast, yet just as compellingly, Jaden Schapiro argues in “Letting The Waves Wash Over” that quiet Rhoda is most aligned with Woolf’s outlook through her attention to “interstitial things—opening a window, entering a room, crossing a street, noticing a fly on the window sill—that ‘good’ writers leave out as unimportant while real life happens here as well and Rhoda is the great noticer of all of it.”
Drawn from the seminar on American Literary Realism, John Cody Gilbert’s “The Body Language Complex of The American” crafts a theoretical lens to explain how the protagonist Christopher Newman, accustomed to American “clock time,” fares when confronted with aristocratic “leisure time” and what he does with his pent-up energy in consequence. In the 19th-century, Henry James shared the popular conception of the English, French, and Americans as belonging to different races, which is how The American and Richard Wright’s Native Son came to bookend the same class on narrative realism. Gilbert’s discussion of the elements of culture “habitually sublimated” in a character’s consciousness invites comparison with Zhikai Sheng’s “Can Bigger Thomas Speak?”—a multipronged theoretical analysis of how Wright’s protagonist is shaped by his internalization of the micro-aggressions emanating from fellow-travelers of the revolution, Jan and Mary, as well as systematic oppression. Without minimizing Bigger’s misdeeds, rape and murder, Sheng compellingly demonstrates how Wright gets the reader inside Bigger’s head as he slowly develops an independent perspective and subjectivity. Elia Smith’s “There Is Only What There Is: Intuition and Intention in the Art-as-Report” is also concerned with matters of aesthetic realism. Smith focuses on the role of the unconscious or incidental as a means of overcoming preconceived intentions in the work of Gerhard Richter and Adrian Piper. Richter’s antinarrative use of a photograph as “a random slice of life” to peel back the layers obscuring “what really exists” is continuous with yet distinct from Adrian Piper’s preference for the photograph’s haptic or chance-idea quality, as a means of subverting conventions of report regarding overt social dynamics.
It may be a reflection of the times in which we live, in which colleges and universities are being taken to task for stifling conservative voices—someone needs a history lesson on the McCarthy era and an English class on irony—but this is the first time a student has asked the editorial collective to articulate a defense of the humanities and the role that publications such as the VCJ can play in advancing the free expression of ideas and intellectual inquiry. One way we do this is by not censoring controversial figures or topics. We had a candid discussion about publishing essays over the reservations of a subset of editors, or even one editor, whose objections were content based rather than qualitative. I apologize for giving examples, but I think it is useful to do so. From a point of view, it is a testament to their high quality that these selections occasioned controversy and survived editorial review. Franklin Zhu’s “Queer Desire and Colonial Power in Noa Noa and The Ebb-Tide” ruffled some feathers by focusing on the homophilic leanings of the post-impressionist artist Gauguin rather than his pedophilia, even though the author wished to make the larger point that the French and English Imperialists’ construction of the Islands, as a site of primitive purity, femininity, and gender fluidity, was a projection. Miranda Chen’s fascinating essay, “Arrested Development: The Uncanny Child in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette,” was for some editors insufficiently critical of source material—James Kinkaid’s “Child Loving: The Erotic Child in Victorian Culture.” The editors admired Anna Terry’s “examination of natural versus artificial grotto-spaces” in regard to Montaigne’s strategic use of rhetorical devices—treating language like building blocks of architecture—and were won over by her account of “Montaigne’s positioning of his work as a grotesque self-referential body.” We also felt her translations from French to English showcased the increasingly rare abilities of a comparative literature scholar. Still, some of us wondered about the lack of context for same-sex desire and homosexual panic in late 16th-century France in “‘Crotesques et corps Monstrueux’: On the Relationship of Montaigne’s Essays to the Grotesque.” In each case, our student authors have clearly defined projects, which foreground the textual incidents or topics of interest to them. We agreed they were fully entitled to do so.
Wendy Graham
Faculty Advisor
Content
“Can Bigger Thomas Speak: An Exploration of the Affective Space” by Zhikai Sheng
“Arrested Development: The Uncanny Child in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette” by Miranda Chen
“Queer Desire and Colonial Power in Noa Noa and The Ebb-Tide” by Franklin Zhu
“There Is Only What There Is: Intuition and Intention in the Art-as-Report” By Elia Smith
“The Body Language Complex of The American” by John Cody Gilbert
“‘Effort and the Struggle’: Heroic Cycles in Bernard’s Final Soliloquy” by Kai Speirs
“Letting The Waves Wash Over: The Rhythm of Non-being” by Jaden Schapiro
