Yale Journal of Criticism 

About: Yale Journal of Criticism is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Poetry & Reading (process). It has an ISSN identifier of 0893-5378. Over the lifetime, 222 publications have been published receiving 2921 citations. The journal is also known as: The Yale journal of criticism.

Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory

Abstract: “One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau that I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July . Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life— ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about.What good was served by seeing them? They were only photographs—of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead, something is still crying.”1

Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality

Abstract: Literary criticism is filled with assumptions specific to print. As print materials are increasingly translated into electronic documents, these unrecognized assumptions tend to be overlaid onto electronic materials without thinking through how textuality must change when texts are electronic. Arguing that an electronic text should properly be considered a process rather than an object, this essay revisits definitions of work, text, and document. Two central premises need to be rethought: that work and text are disembodied, and that "work" is a convergent ideal construct. The essay proposes instead that both work and text be considered embodied and media-specific, and that "work" be thought of as an Assemblage rather than a convergent ideal.

On Auto-Ethnographic Authority

Abstract: Widespread critiques of anthropology and advocacy for "situated knowledges" have created an atmosphere highly favorable to the rise of an autoethnography, yet use of the concept has so far been uneven, undertheorized, and largely unacknowledged. Wariness of essentialism, dissatisfaction with "culture," and confusion about the metaphors structuring our thought on group identity and ethnographic authority are important reasons why. Analyzing autoethnography's simultaneous indispensability and inadmissibility in contemporary critical discourse, this essay suggests that the prestige of the participant's perspective, fed upon the critiques of objectivity, has now attained a magnitude dangerous to criticism itself.

Petted Things: Wuthering Heights and the Animal

Abstract: Here’s a riddle: what invention of eighteenth-century England develops, in the course of the nineteenth century, into a major instance of and vehicle for the culture’s high valuation of sympathy and domestic life, and becomes known, worldwide, as a quintessential embodiment of English identity and a national self-image founded on an idealized vision of home? If the genre of the novel probably comes to mind, the modern domestic pet also fits the bill. If England became known as a nation of shop-keepers, it was also preeminently associated with long novels and beloved pet animals, two cultural forms which, I argue, developed not just in parallel but in tandem. Indeed, although the link has been little remarked, it seems fair to say that the history of English domestic fiction is deeply bound up with that of the domestic animal.1 In this essay I develop an argument about one aspect of that relationship through an analysis of the meanings of pethood, animality, and cruelty in the early novels of the Brontë sisters—Wuthering Heights in particular. The governess narrator of Anne Brontë’s Agnes Gray discovers, to her dismay, that the favorite “amusement” of her young charge, Tom, is to mutilate and torture baby birds: