Project MUSE®: The Yale Journal of Criticism - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Yale Journal of Criticism.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 9 (1996) - vol. 18 (2005)Latest Articles: The Yale Journal of CriticismTWOProject MUSE®The Yale Journal of Criticism1080-66360893-5378Latest articles in The Yale Journal of Criticism. Feed provided by Project MUSE®"Going to Canada": The Politics and Poetics of Northern Exodus
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193310
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A cover story in the January 4, 2004 New York Times Magazine titled "The Things They Carry" is a reminder that the Vietnam era lingers uneasily in U.S. political consciousness.1 Alluding in its title to the ubiquitously anthologized short story by Tim O'Brien, the article claims that the Democrats would face difficult questions about national security because of their image as the anti-war party, which extends back to their opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The questions about military duty that surfaced around the 2004 Presidential race are nothing new: each major election since the 1970s has served as a symbolic referendum on that tumultuous moment in U.S. history, as boomer-age candidates are called
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmall"Going to Canada": The Politics and Poetics of Northern Exodus2006-02-10text/htmlen-US"Going to Canada": The Politics and Poetics of Northern Exodus2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®1096582026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10A Message to Our Readers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193311
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It is with sadness, as well as satisfaction, that we present this special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism. It will be the last issue of the journal for the foreseeable future, though we hope that, at some propitious moment, YJC may be able to resume its work under new editorial guidance. At this moment, the best we can do is to remind ourselves and our readers what YJC was founded for, and what it has accomplished.
The Yale Journal of Criticism was founded in 1987 by a group of five junior faculty at Yale wishing to make space in the scholarly landscape for innovative scholarship that would help to shape the compelling contemporary debates in literary studies and literary theory. In particular, it aimed to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmallA Message to Our Readers2006-02-10text/htmlen-USA Message to Our Readers2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®49142026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10The New Left before the Counter-Culture
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193312
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Sean McCann and Michael Szalay have sensible things to say about the New Left, about the "cultural" turn of the later sixties and early seventies, and about the influence of both moments on the academic mood that brought forth cultural studies. Still, from 1960 to the present is a long stretch, even with Michel Foucault as a connecting link, and I can address only a small part of the larger subject: the character of the New Left around 1962–66, when a distinctive politics seemed to be emerging. This politics, as I read it, was not much tinged by the irrationalism and religiosity that McCann and Szalay treat as major motifs of the sixties. Or maybe we need several words for several possible modes of distrust of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmallThe New Left before the Counter-Culture2006-02-10text/htmlen-USThe New Left before the Counter-Culture2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®67752026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193313
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Rachel Adams is an associate professor of English and American Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. This article comes from her current research on cultures of the North American continent.
David Bromwich is a professor of English at Yale University. He is the author most recently of Skeptical Music: Essays on Modernn Poetry.
Mary Esteve is an associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal, where she teaches courses in American literature and critical theory. She is the author of The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003), as well as numerous articles and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2006-02-10text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®52872026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10"Total system, total solution, total apocalypse": Sex Oppression, Systems of Property, and 1970s Women's Liberation Fiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193315
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"Everything belongs to me, because I am poor," Jack Kerouac observed, in a remark that has been dubbed the "essence of Beat" by poet Allen Ginsberg.1 Kerouac's celebrated remark asserts a link between his lack of property and his penchant for liberatory experience. This link between property and authentic experience also pervades Beatnik literature's representations of "libertinism," or what would soon become known as "sexual liberation."2 One of Kerouac's most renowned sexual encounters—narrated in Diane di Prima's 1969 Memoirs of a Beatnik—brought together di Prima, Ginsberg, and several others, for an evening of raunchy group sex.3 Graphically recounted, di Prima's self-described erotic adventures included
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmall"Total system, total solution, total apocalypse": Sex Oppression, Systems of Property, and 1970s Women's Liberation Fiction2006-02-10text/htmlen-US"Total system, total solution, total apocalypse": Sex Oppression, Systems of Property, and 1970s Women's Liberation Fiction2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®1844762026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10Postmodern Supernaturalism: Ginsberg and the Search for a Supernatural Language
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193316
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When Allen Ginsberg testified at the Chicago Seven trial in December of 1969, Judge Julius J. Hoffman and his Federal District Court saw before them the figure who defined Beat poetry in the popular imagination. Ginsberg appeared in 1969 as he had since his return from India in 1963 and as he would for most of the next two decades: a countercultural figure, a thin man with full beard, heavy-framed glasses, and long hair cascading from the edges of a growing bald spot. This was the Allen Ginsberg who had returned from that sixteen-month stay in India ready to turn poetry into a spiritual practice that would parallel, and in his personal life take the place of, the exploration and transformation of consciousness
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmallPostmodern Supernaturalism: Ginsberg and the Search for a Supernatural Language2006-02-10text/htmlen-USPostmodern Supernaturalism: Ginsberg and the Search for a Supernatural Language2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®1381752026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10Chants Demagogic
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193317
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By now, blaming the counterculture for the "cultural turn" in left political theory so as to indict both is a pretty tired act. It carries the fetid whiff of Richard Rorty in the 1990s, Russell Jacoby in the 1980s, and Christopher Lasch in the 1970s, and you would think that at this point an entire volume devoted to such a critique would be supererogatory. In Sean McCann's and Michael Szalay's Introduction and concluding essay, "Do You Believe in Magic," all the stops are pulled out—Norman Mailer is scarcely different from Lionel Trilling, who in turn resembles C. Wright Mills; and distinctions disappear between libertarianisms left and right. All proving, supposedly, that anti-institutional political excesses in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmallChants Demagogic2006-02-10text/htmlen-USChants Demagogic2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®111282026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10Introduction: Paul Potter and the Cultural Turn
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193318
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When Paul Potter, the president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), addressed the April 1965 March on Washington to end the war in Vietnam, he probably had little idea how influential the words he spoke would turn out to be. As Potter approached the podium, the last of the day's many speakers, he was the representative of a small if fiercely inspired organization of young activists—a loose-knit group of no more than a thousand or so members in perhaps a dozen chapters scattered across the country. The antiwar movement itself was yet a loose grouping of spontaneous local eruptions, and the larger "Movement" for a freer and more humane society it would help ignite remained but a gleam in the eye of a few
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmallIntroduction: Paul Potter and the Cultural Turn2006-02-10text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Paul Potter and the Cultural Turn2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®495022026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193319
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When first asked to lend his name and presence to the antiwar March on the Pentagon in 1967, Norman Mailer was skeptical, not because he questioned the goals of the event, but because he thought he might do more to stop the war in Vietnam by writing. "When was everyone going to cut out the nonsense and get to work, do their own real work?" he wondered. "One's own literary work was the only answer to the war in Vietnam."1 But in the book that came out of his experience, Armies of the Night (1968), Mailer explains that "like all good professionals, he was stimulated by the chance to try a new if related line of work" (28). And to his delight, he discovered almost immediately that this new line was more closely
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmallDo You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left2006-02-10text/htmlen-USDo You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®2061592026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10Learning from Little Tree: The Political Education of the Counterculture
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193320
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If the individual wishes, he can add touches to his clothes to make them a costume, expressing whatever he feels at the moment. With the magic deftness of stage sorcery, a headband can produce an Indian, a black hat a cowboy badman.
One of the more amusing chapters in Forrest Carter's The Education of Little Tree is the one called "Church-going," where the orphan boy protagonist and his half-Cherokee grandfather take leave of the nature-spirits of their mountain home to observe the conventions of Christian worship from the vantage point of a pew:
Once a month there was testifying time. This is when people would stand up, one by one, and tell how much they loved the Lord, and what all bad they had done. Granpa
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmallLearning from Little Tree: The Political Education of the Counterculture2006-02-10text/htmlen-USLearning from Little Tree: The Political Education of the Counterculture2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®1152732026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10How the Conjure-Man Gets Busy: Cultural Nationalism, Masculinity, and Performativity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193321
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As a movement in and of culture, Black Power was itself an art form. . . . Influencing the lives and aspirations of everyday people in ways unrevealed by membership rosters and public opinion polls, Black Power motivated Afro-Americans of the sixties and early seventies to redefine themselves. In the process, it forced a reappraisal of American social and cultural values
Since its publication in 1992, William L. Van Deburg's New Day in Babylon has not only emerged as a landmark historical survey of the Black Power movement but as a definitive statement about the era's cultural politics. Critical to the study's revisionism is the argument that the movement left its most enduring and affirmative legacy in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmallHow the Conjure-Man Gets Busy: Cultural Nationalism, Masculinity, and Performativity2006-02-10text/htmlen-USHow the Conjure-Man Gets Busy: Cultural Nationalism, Masculinity, and Performativity2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®1270572026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10Past Using James Baldwin and Civil Rights Law in the 1960s
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193322
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In the 1940s and 1950s James Baldwin repeatedly cast "the social dynamic" as the key to "responsible" and "realistic" responses to racial disadvantage in America.2 Effective interventions into America's racial crisis could only take place when the misguided "charity" (609) of whites was supplanted by "Clarity" (609) about "how Negroes live" (26). By Baldwin's essays from the 1960s, though, the alternative to this charity was an understanding of African American history, not African American society. "What one begs the American people to do, for all our sakes, is simply to accept our history" (716–717), Baldwin explained in the 1965 essay "The American Dream and the American Negro." Why? There is "scarcely any hope
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmallPast Using James Baldwin and Civil Rights Law in the 1960s2006-02-10text/htmlen-USPast Using James Baldwin and Civil Rights Law in the 1960s2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®825872026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10Liberating Sade
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193323
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Appearing to stand before the onslaught of modernity, there was something seductive about the Restoration and the eighteenth century to many in the 1960s. The epoch evoked the final days before industrialization, capitalism, and the bourgeoisie definitively took over. Not that these matters were always carefully thought through, and there are aspects of this attraction that now seem strange. Consider the mixed signals sent by the appearance of the members of the Jimi Hendrix Experience: a multi-racial, transnational rock band decked out in attire redolent of aristocratic chic from a bygone era (ruffles, velvet jackets and suchlike frippery) and all sporting hefty afros (black and white alike). While the eighteenth
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmallLiberating Sade2006-02-10text/htmlen-USLiberating Sade2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®1436812026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10Cultural Politics and the Sociology of the University
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193324
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I welcome Sean McCann's and Michael Szalay's engaged and articulate reconsideration of the cultural politics of the American New Left and the aftermath of poststructuralist theory in the humanities. In the limited space I have to respond, I cannot take up the many elements of evidence that they have marshaled to support their cultural history of the New Left's withdrawal from mainstream politics and theoretical undermining of the public sphere, and their critique of American literary critics' correspondingly vain and "mystified" pursuit of cultural politics in the wake of these developments.1 I want to focus briefly on an underplayed dimension of their analysis: the sociological. In pointing to the congruent ideas
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/210/image/coversmallCultural Politics and the Sociology of the University2006-02-10text/htmlen-USCultural Politics and the Sociology of the University2006-02-102006TWOProject MUSE®330412026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002006-02-10