The Yale Journal of Criticism publishes works of interest to readers in the humanities, irrespective of field or period, including scholarly articles, original art, review essays, polemical interventions, and conference and symposium papers. The journal engages in current methodological debates in literature, history, philosophy, popular culture, and the visual arts. Work from the YJC has appeared in Best American Essays.
Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2004
CONTENTS:
- Ray, Gene. Reading the Lisbon Earthquake: Adorno, Lyotard, and the Contemporary Sublime
Abstract: The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 famously shook the metaphysical optimism of Europe's leading philosophers. Immanuel Kant would eventually manage its threat in "The Analytic of the Sublime" of his 1790 Critique of Judgment. In the twentieth century, human-inflicted catastrophes have supplanted the natural disaster as the source of sublime feeling. Auschwitz, however, is the name of an "event" that permits no compensatory retreat to an ostensible human dignity and is not recuperable within a transcendental tale of progress and greater good. The essay traces the qualitative transformation of the sublime across the texts of Kant, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Jean-François Lyotard.
- Pelizzon, V. Penelope. West, Nancy Martha, 1963- "Good Stories" from the Mean Streets: Weegee and Hard-Boiled Autobiography
Abstract: Our essay studies the exchanges between tabloid news and the entertainment media's representations of crime during the 1930s and 1940s. Section One considers how tabloid photographers, including Weegee, recast news-work hardships as "hard boiled" prose autobiographies. Meanwhile, Hollywood crime films were borrowing representational tropes directly from the tabloids. Part Two argues that Weegee's seminal 1945 photo-essay Naked City must be reconsidered as autobiography. Part Three posits that film noir's current popularity derives from a middlebrow desire to enjoy crime imagery while distinguishing such images from contemporary tabloid media. By neglecting crime films' allegiance with the tabloids, however, film scholarship has overlooked a major influence upon the noir canon.
- Chaouli, Michel, 1959-. Irresistible Rape: The Lure of Closure in "The Marquise of O . . . ."
Abstract: Taking Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 novella "The Marquise of O" as a case study, the essay argues that cognitive and affective--i.e., bodily--responses to literature heavily constrain the range of interpretations that, based on the text alone, ought to be available to readers. Thus the near-unanimous understanding of the central conundrum of the novella is not due to an evaluation of evidence, but thanks to certain bodily investments that are largely immune to modification by rational means. The essay argues that the scene of rape imagined by the reader is so affectively charged that in effect it forecloses interpretive paths opened by a formal reading.
- Jenson, Deborah. Mimetic Mastery and Colonial Mimicry In the First Franco-Antillean Creole Anthology
Abstract: The anonymous 1811 Idylles et chansons, ou essais de poésie créole has been received as a minor work of Creole poetry by a single author. This essay demonstrates that it is actually the first known Creole literary anthology, containing variations on works including the earliest published Creole poem, "Lisette quitté la plaine," from mid-eighteenth century Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Since the anthology attests to the circulation and transformation of early Creole texts, it puts their presumed béké (white Caribbean-born) authorial origins into question. I interpret tensions in racial and linguistic hierarchies in "Lisette" in relation to two conceptualizations of slavery and literary voice: postcolonial theories of colonial mimesis, and historical commentaries on the poetic productivity of non-white members of colonial society.
- De Bruyn, Frans. From Georgic Poetry to Statistics and Graphs: Eighteenth-Century Representations and the "State" of British Society
Abstract: This essay examines the emergent science of statistics in eighteenth-century Europe as a mode of representation and demonstrates its connections with more conventional literary representations in the period. The essay focuses on two central questions: how statistics, charts, and graphs functioned as modes of representation and what it is they were thought to represent. Statistics and graphs, it is argued, bear significant affinities with some major literary forms in the period, in particular, the novel and the topographical or georgic-descriptive poem. These seemingly disparate representational forms share important features that reflect underlying cultural and epistemological assumptions common to them all.
- Levinson, Julian. The Maimed Body and the Tortured Soul: Holocaust Survivors in American Film
Abstract: This article explores how changing modalities of cinematic representation generate new forms of Holocaust awareness and response. It contends that the two phases of Holocaust response in America--the first marked by reticence, the second by a wide proliferation of public discourse--can each be associated with distinct strategies of representing survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. The first strategy draws attention to the maimed body of the victim; the second delves into the tortured psyche of the victim. This transformation can be seen by examining the technical innovations of Sidney Lumet's 1965 film, The Pawnbroker, which incorporates flashbacks to represent involuntary memory and to encourage viewer empathy with the survivor figure