In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: A Message from the CEA Board of Directors Dear CEA Members: COVID-19 has taken so much from us as a nation and as a profession. Of course, the cost in human lives eclipses everything else, but other costs register in how we have been asked to give up things that matter in order to ensure the safety of ourselves, our families, and our communities

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Editor’s Introduction: Living the Teaching Life in a Time of COVID-19 Jeraldine R. Kraver There are very few bright spots for those of us living and teaching in the time of COVID. And, frankly, “those of us” pretty much means all of us. Things that seemed as if they could be positive effects—more family time, the opportunity to master

Abstract: “The sudden disruption was a poignant lesson in organisational resilience. After an initial period of uncertainty, we steadily trimmed superfluous operations and shifted the focus to the contingencies of online teaching and learning. Although the crisis was totally unexpected and unplanned for, we were adapting at an impressive speed. Operations felt leaner and more supple. There was less

Abstract: “Not much has changed really. I still read, I still write essays, I still discuss with my peers. The truth remains that if all of those familiar faces popped up present and excited, it still wouldn’t be enough…”

Abstract: “Taken from a certain angle, the 2020 Spring Semester re-enacted Ionesco’s absurdist vision. COVID-19 was the (rhino)virus that trampled the carapace of higher education, infecting millions within the population and transforming the administrative landscape, almost instantaneously. For administrators in higher education, the shifting ground meant very little time to amass data, make sense

Abstract: “The ‘monstrous’ entity that is COVID-19 has turned all our personal, social, and professional lives upside down and inside out. In the same manner that the fantastic creatures of cinema have done, our first contact with the epistemologically “inscrutable” virus has radically reshaped not just how we live our lives but how we relate to nonhuman and posthuman life in the age of the Anthropocene

Abstract: “Coronavirus departs from some conventions of the picture book genre. For instance, it does not have named characters, although some of the same children appear regularly in the illustrations. In addition, it does not tell a narrative. Rather, the question/answer format makes readers perceive they are hearing professional information delivered in a straightforward manner. This informational

Abstract: “In the machine there is no way to moveThrough rows of bodies asThey struggle with equation or essay.”

Abstract: “Nevertheless, what the students produced time and again showed us something about their adjustment to the new medium and how it seemed to support their engagement—not in their teachers’ presentations or lessons—but in their own learning. To adapt the quotation by Carl Sandburg that is a starting point for this journal issue, we had planned and, therefore, we thought we knew what to expect

Abstract: “Typically, we think of the term ‘in the weeds’ in the context of managing a busy restaurant and dealing with complexities, details, and crises that seem to spring anew with each passing moment. The uncertainty of what online teaching could, would, and should look like felt like standing in a diner on a Saturday morning with staff and customers rushing by in the quest for food. As in a diner

Abstract: “This excerpt lays bare the enormous impact of COVID-19 in different fields of activity, including education. Formal structures of imparting education are reconfigured so as to address the COVID- 19 situation pedagogically; however, those structures present new challenges. The spread of the virus across India has not only revealed the ailing public health infrastructure in India, it also

Abstract: “While certainly not the intent, these projects became accidental histories of how groups underwent dramatic changes. If the aim of many CBR assignments is to capture the stories of a community and its activities and missions, my students’ work illuminated how groups scrambled to adapt and to remain supportive and cohesive. Given more time, I wish that I could have better circulated these

Abstract: “My first instinct was to jump into originally planned content when the semester resumed. I already had the assignments ready, and it would have been easy for me to move everything back one week and expect students to proceed as scheduled. But, a feeling stopped me. I was having a difficult time emotionally with plans changing and events canceling. I was exploring what type of educator I

Abstract: “I dive into the long streak of white reflection the moon marks on the water, while you watch a wave move through town and sweep away the practiced habits of setting a table, the moored hopes in the mirror, the materialized dreams, change of clothes, storm embankment by the water.”

Abstract: “What I learned surprised me and brought me to this conclusion: I’m not going back. Well, I do hope to return to my office someday, and I would like to see my colleagues and literally smell the coffee and microwave popcorn again. But, teaching online has been a revelation. As one who started with on-line platforms before the pandemic and then adapted even further as a result of the pandemic

Abstract: “This situation has made me think about my strengths and weaknesses. It has taught me to channel my strength in the right direction and not to sit quietly; otherwise, it will leave me far behind in this fast-moving world. Where I am, you get very little time to capitalize on your strengths. As a result, you become a follower like others and not be able to lead. Now, I see myself in a leading

Abstract: “As an engineer, definitions and parameters guide my work. Peter Charles, of Newman University in Birmingham, England, offers a definition for modernism that aligns with my experience: ‘It is experimental, formally complex, elliptical, contains elements of decreation as well as creation, and tends to associate notions of the artist’s freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre and

Abstract: “As in many other countries worldwide, the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus saw the sudden closure of all French universities starting in mid-March 2020. Universities had to drastically re-think their means of communication during times of crisis (Veil et al. 110). Although student welfare is recognised as being important, it can be intangible and difficult to measure and monitor (Lusk and

Abstract: “In Forster’s story, isolation is humanity’s standard mode of living, perceived as quite advanced and civilized. Individuals live in separation from one another, working and communicating with one another from their cells through the Machine’s various devices. For instance, Vashti is a lecturer, and after Kuno’s phone call, she returns to her class. Forster describes what we now would recognize

Abstract: “To maintain some normalcy and sanity, I took frequent walks around campus during the workday with my camera. My intention, as anytime when I take walks with my camera, was to capture images that interested me, that caught my eye. Together, these images tell a bit of the story of Hanover College during part of the pandemic: the beauty, still; the deceptive quietness; the isolation; the wasted

Abstract: “The weekend of Spring Break began, and after chatting with my office mates, I started to move my class online for remote learning. As I began to reinvent my syllabus, I finally realized the reality of our new situation. I was sad for two days in a row and didn’t make much progress. My sadness took me by surprise because from all outward appearances, I wouldn’t call myself emotional or emotionally

Abstract: “Shaped down silences, conundrums swim unthought.”

Abstract:"The tidalectic, a tidal dialectic between the land, the sea, and the beach, is as follows: the land embodies the hypothesis, the sea the antithesis, and the beach the synthesis. Because the beach serves as the synthesizing locus for a Caribbean poetics of beginnings in Omeros, I am adapting Kamau Brathwaite's neologism of the tidalectic to re-name the threefold relation between these natural

Abstract:"Unlike Paris, with its established community and conventions, in Spain, Hemingway began to rethink expatriation as a form of authentic cultural engagement rather than merely a translation of American values into a European setting (as was the case in Paris). Hemingway highlights the difference in these two forms of expatriation in his first Spanish-set novel, The Sun Also Rises, which centers

Abstract:“Using the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever as a test case, I demonstrate in this essay how Yiddish Holocaust poetry can be devoted to continuity within devastating rupture. The lasting continuity of trauma, which erupts repeatedly into Sutzkever’s poems years after the war, is vital to his role as a prophetic witness to the Holocaust. This continuity also aligns itself with the survival of

Abstract:"Searles explores the types of bridges humans build between themselves and the nonhuman environment. These ideas enable readers to contemplate their own relationship to things as a pathway to self-recognition and self-empowerment, as well as to reflect on the often-neglected philosophical and psychological power of things to shape our lives. Using Searles' categories of healthy and unhealthy

Abstract:“The actuality of being transgender demonstrates the flexibility of supposed facts of ourselves and prompts imagining how one might transition other identity categories as well. These speculative transitions foster thinking about extant human realities from different angles, as well as unsettle assumptions regarding what and whom we value. My pedagogy builds on these trans concepts and brings

Abstract:“Despite the trend toward stay-at-home mothering in the post-WWII decades, few popular women’s narratives…focus on the domesticated woman, with the notable exceptions of Grace Metalious’s scandalous bestseller Peyton Place (1956), Sue Kaufman’s acerbic social commentary Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967), and Betty Friedan’s liberal-feminist manifesto The Feminine Mystique (1963). Herein, Friedan

Abstract:“Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel Libra is a work with an unavoidable kinesis, the characters and the reader alike drawing towards the Kennedy assassination through the centrifugal forces of history. What DeLillo regards as the “seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” (181) is an event that has permeated and saturated the American cultural consciousness for the past half-century

Abstract:“In his diverse writings based in Washington in the 1920s, particularly the middle section of Cane, Jean Toomer addresses the negative social impact of this tangible division of the capital…. Focusing on his characters’ taxing urban experience in and around the infamous alleys, which contained the city’s poorest, mostly African-American inhabitants, Toomer’s texts imply that it was not only

Abstract:“One area of study that may further understanding both the histories of pedagogy in composition and literature concerns centers on Catholic schools run by women religious. While Cinthia Gannett and John Brereton’s rich anthology of essays on the rhetorical tradition within the Jesuit education begins to explore the effect Catholic educators have had on American rhetorical education, less researched

Abstract:"As a feminist pedagogue who seeks to incorporate what Peggy Chinn calls the kind of 'thoughtful reflection and action … toward the goal of transforming the world' that is central to reversing the oftentimes invisible patriarchal hold that academics asserts on the individual, I mindfully reject pedagogical practices in which the teacher asserts her 'power over' her students. Instead, I work

Abstract:"While she lives in Garden Heights, a predominantly poor, black neighborhood, she attends a rich, mostly white private high school called Williamson Prep. Herein lies one of the novel's central tensions; since the two worlds Starr inhabits are in a sense opposite, she must split herself to function in each one. Garden Heights Starr is at home in the black, poor community; Williamson Starr

Abstract:"Filmmaker Wim Wenders and poet and philosopher Mary Zournazi worked together on Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception. The two were driven by the same question: Why do we have such difficulty seeing peace? From this question, another follows: Why do we not have more representations of peace? They argue that 'Quintessentially, peace is the imagining of a different world, but a world that

Abstract:"I advocate for a wellness-themed first-year composition curriculum in which students read texts on relevant topics and complete writing and presentation tasks that engage with current college health conversations. Drawing from my experiences designing and piloting such a course, I aim to show how a wellness theme can bridge students' transition from high school to college by supporting their

Abstract:"In thinking about Magical Realism in literature, readers might envision works fraught with a sense of the fantastic—in short, any kind of narrative invested with magical undertones. The term 'Magical Realism' was originally coined by Franz Roh in 1924 to describe 'the new paintings' return to realism after Expressionism's more abstract style' (15). Magical Realism, applied to Latin American

Abstract:"From her earliest essays about California during the 1960s to her National Book Award-winning memoir on the death of her husband, Didion has turned to modernist writers to make sense of her experiences. In the title essay of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she explicitly invokes William Butler Yeats's vision of social and cultural disintegration after World War I when she blames the hippies

In introducing The CEA Critic’s 80th anniversary issue, I noted that the journey through those eight decades inspired me to propose to my fellow editors that we introduce two new occasional features to our journal. The first was the result of my culling 80 years of some really fine writing and ideas into that single (albeit a double) issue. Why not, I suggested, highlight an essay from the past in

Teaching the film Chinatown should be challenging given its depth, complexity, and lack of resolution, but students often walk away from a screening of the film saying the opposite: “That takes care of that” and “Now we know what happened.” Examining Chinatown opens up critical debate and discussion in my classroom because of the very misunderstandings and pat interpretations we make as viewers.1 Training

Editor’s note: In a presentation for the 2013 CEA Conference in Savannah, screenwriter, director, and actor Ian Dixon gave a multi-media presentation titled “The Actor’s Nature in Mise-enscène: Chekhovian Kinaesthesia and Cinematic Performance.” Part of that presentation involved showing some scenes from John Cassavetes’ 1968 film Faces. What follows is that part of his talk, which we present here

the professors of literature are now plainly on the defensive, and may be seen from time to time peeping under the lids of their writing desks, and poking around in all the corners of their departments and among their old papers, trying to find out, if they can, just ‘what’ subject it is they are teaching. Is it history, philology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, ethics? It cannot very well be

My thesis is that revision is creation and that it is a far more exciting and revelatory process than the mere manipulating of word and idea, though at its lowest level it is, of course, also that. My thesis is that we learn form as we learn understanding; my thesis is that metaphor (“to see the world in a grain of sand”) is the great teacher of the poet as he wrestles to discover what he really means

1. This book presents in a peculiarly painful form the special difficulties of a classroom relation to literary works; the apparatus that already surrounds it suggests the possibility and danger of our taking the scaffolding for the skeleton and basing our views of Ulysses upon the systematic and more or less demonstrable nature of its correspondences; whereas a more essential consideration might begin

Members of the CEA will recall the discussion started by Mr. Henry Canby and carried on in these columns over the desirability of English courses exclusively devoted to contemporary literature. In the course of that argument it was pointed out that much writing of the moment is experimental, and that the author himself is testing devices and techniques which later may be abandoned. Miss Willa Cather

We have fallen from the Garden, and the Garden itself—nature conceived as an inviolate wilderness—is pocked with nuclear waste and toxic dumps, at the mercy of industry and Watt, all of it open to nuclear defilement. Generations come and go, but the earth abideth forever is something we need to feel, one of the foundations of poetry and humanness, and now we are not sure. That is the problem with nuclear

And so on. I have chosen this poem to illustrate my first proposition, because it happens to be a poem in which the poem itself is immediately recognizable without reference to the manner in which it is rendered. If the style and the poem are one, one ought to choose, for the purpose of illustration, a poem that illustrates this as, for example, Yeats’ “Lake Isle of Innisfree.” To choose a French poem

In his essay on the board game Twilight Struggle (TS) from Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s 2016 collection Zones of Control: perspectives on wargaming, Jeremy Antley notes that “wargames are synthesized reflections of the past situated in the present mindset of their creation,” and concludes that TS is “in effect, both a secondary source about Cold War history and a primary source about

The beginning of the twenty-first century has seen race and race relations in the United States of America return to days of Freedom Riders, Jim Crow laws, and (figurative if not literal) cross burnings in the night. In 2016 we saw a response to these things come out of the pop culture genre. While one of these responses is specifically a game, Mafia III, the other comes to us from the Marvel comic

How many games do you play a day? a week? How do you play them— alone or with friends? What sorts of games are they? Do you hold the game in your hand or do you play it on a board, an electronic device, or a console? Do a quick count now. As for us, Bistline is a bit addicted to Game of War: Fire Age, and Hawkins is equally obsessed (this week) with Cookie Jam. The two of us are typical of the majority

In this paper, I consider what may be a rather singular role of islands as metaphors. I begin with the presentation of a few particular metaphoric expressions, some that may seem novel and some that will undoubtedly seem very familiar. I then briefly offer a little background on how a cognitive theory of metaphor provides some insight into our responses to these examples. I also summarize the extent

But, for all his complexities, King’s recorded observations of wilderness places rise above his life’s convolutions. Unfortunately, what escapes many scholars is the remarkableness of King’s writing, an irony considering its salience; in fact, King’s brilliance is best illustrated in his lexical finesse, poetic flights of language, and artistic verisimilitude of nature’s beauties.

This paper explores the shared and individual experiences of Saudi women studying English as a Second Language (ESL) in the United States at an intensive English language program prior to entering college and graduate programs. Saudi women face cultural communication practices that they would not encounter in their home country, most notably the use of the English language but also the integration

A bestseller during its day, Lost Horizon became the first-ever mass-market paperback and has never been out of print since its initial release…. Further demonstrating the novel’s enduring influence and appeal, Lost Horizon has inspired several sequel novels, a musical, radio adaptations, and the namesake for the Shangri-La Hotel chain. Indeed, the word Shangri-la itself was coined by Hilton and has

Whether tinted with disapproval for Amis’s behavior or affectionate bemusement at his crusty humor, popular interest in Amis’s personal life has tended to overshadow textual analysis of Lucky Jim—or to precipitate a conflation of protagonist and author. . . .

The 1990s, which marked the five-hundred year anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas, coincided with the emergence of new additions to the canon of dystopian literature. Produced by authors who are not typically associated with the genre, these novels argue that dystopia is not something we need to imagine because it is already here. Two examples—Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

While Young Goodman Brown maintains his faith, he faces a life of insular misery after his experience, estranged from family and community. The protagonist of “Circumstance” emerges from the woods with little concern for her spiritual salvation, embracing her family who has survived the fate of their small settlement that has been destroyed by Indians. The difference in the tenor of the ending is reflective

The biological inheritance captured in the beautiful “Pickersgill hand” that Ben and Desmond and their sisters have inherited from their mother also flows in one direction. But, the moral inheritance that connects mother to daughters and daughters to servants circulates among them and blurs conventional roles and the distinction between the agent and the subject of disciplinary authority.

“As an advertisement, guide, and souvenir for the exhibit, the elaborate La Gazette du Vieux Paris offered its subscribers stories, poems, and images . . . about a particular period in French history in folios that reproduced the paper, lettering, subject matter, and illustrations of that period, beginning with Gallo-Roman France and ending with the First French Empire.”

“Perhaps most significant is that Miz Rain positions herself as a role model for [Precious] Jones. In Jones’ aberrational family unit, problematic public schooling, and racism- infused Harlem microcosm, Jones has never before had someone in her own life to play that role. Miz Rain marks the first person in Jones’ world who has built a successful life for herself, and Jones’ esteem for Miz Rain fuels

A few years ago, I served as an outside reader on a dissertation that examined the history of performance-based Shakespearean pedagogy. In that study, I learned of Orson Welles’s work with his former headmaster, Roger Hill of the Todd School. They wished to create a series called Everybody’s Shakespeare, a collection of edited plays for students to learn Shakespeare through performance. Welles and