Dear readers, 

 

Suture began in Spring 2018 as a continuation of the now defunct journal Forty Three North, published under the guidance of what was then the Hamilton Department of Comparative Literature. Forty Three North was Hamilton’s first and only interdisciplinary journal, intended to promote discussion and collaboration between students from different academic backgrounds and to address and challenge the fragmentation of Hamilton’s intellectual life. In 2018, our editors were left with a container, a form to remold into a new space which honored our community’s history while making room for experimentation, complexity, and ambiguity. 

 

This semester, our contributors have honored this commitment, using their scholarship to mold old forms into new shapes that celebrate questioning and contradiction. Madison Lazenby’s essay on Madame de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy questions how gendered ideals are constructed and reformulated within literary texts that reimagine the social practices of the past even while insisting on their own limited version of Ideal Womanhood. Elizabeth Gaillard’s “Create God In Your Own Image: Reimagining Religious Texts In The Comic Form,” makes a convincing argument for the necessity of imagination and interpretation, as she interrogates how reinterpretations of Biblical narratives use alternate forms to grant readers the autonomy to become active participants in narrative construction. Lucas Zheng brings together Arent’s and Marcuse’s thoughts on impartiality, illuminating how placing disparate thinkers in conversation brings forth new possibilities in the midst of contradiction. These and the other essays in this edition of Suture remind us to question what we think we know and to trust in our imagination. 

 

Our hope in bringing together these thematically, formally, and disciplinarily diverse essays in one journal issue is to create a space where scholars with vastly different approaches can work together to answer (and to complicate) vital questions. This is our last semester as editors of Suture and as students at Hamilton College, and we could not be more proud of the work our writers and editors have put into this edition. To quote our predecessor Zachary Deming, the mind behind the first edition of Suture, “we hope it's slick, and that you like it.” 

 

Farewell and happy reading, 

Bella and Lillian