With this inaugural issue, we present Axium, a journal of comparative criticism that publishes the work of Dartmouth undergraduate and graduate students.
The concept for what this journal would be, as well as what it would be made of, dominated the preliminary stages of its beginnings. We knew that we wanted it to focus on comparative criticism, and yet we wished to open that theme to its limits. This flexibility required a rejection of purely literary criticism and of a monolingual expectation for our authors. Out of these rejections, we wanted to embrace and ground ourselves in the transnational, the interdisciplinary, and the multimedia. We also knew that both ‘comparative’ and ‘criticism’ are capacious terms, so we left them open to their many potential (and potentially conflicting) meanings on the grounds that truly exciting thought transgresses disciplinary, methodological, and national boundaries in necessarily unpredictable ways.
We laid the foundations of Axium in the hope we had for our authors and the realm of possibilities that could be found in those two words.
As part of our first issue, we reflect on a class of students that saw their college experiences affected by the pandemic. In a time where communication seems to be at its most advanced, how do we go about communicating what was lost? Thus this issue takes translation as its major theme, the emphasis on the meaning that gets across, and that which gets erased. We hope that the articles in this issue, taken together, paint a picture of some of the myriad ways that one can traverse linguistic difference.
We want to thank the Comparative Literature Department, our Program Administrator, Liz Cassell, and the Chair of the Department, Yuliya Komska, for their constant support, which has made Axium possible. Of course, we also want to thank our authors for their interest in the journal and their willingness to collaborate with us all these months. It’s them and their work that this is all about.