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Empathy and Trauma: A Cognitive Approach to Mrs. Dalloway CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-07-03 Martin Brick
Abstract: A popular (though not necessarily scientifically validated) theory holds that reading fiction builds empathy. Because literary characters are media representations, limited and defined by point-of-view, diction, and readers’ pre-existing stereotypes, they tend not to elicit empathy in a fair, even manner. This essay will explore such questions as whether certain characteristics elicit greater
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Sound Presentation of the Silent History: Orature in Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-07-03 Jing Duan
Abstract: In her novel The Stone Virgins, Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera provides a model of orature writing by using sound in the interaction between literature and history as well as literature and politics. This essay will principally draw on the ideas of Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o as well as Roland Barthes’ ideas about listening to analyze this effect. As a medium of oral tradition that carries
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"How we go on": Tradition's Talent and the Individual Poet in Gary Snyder's "Axe Handles" CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-07-03 K. Narayana Chandran
Abstract: This essay examines Gary Snyder’s poem from various aspects: T. S. Eliot’s “tradition,” Ezra Pound’s “ideas in action,” and Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, to name a few. The learning at issue here is open and unconstrained, if only because in the short “Axe Handles,” things heard, seen, learnt, and internalized a long while ago at first hand matter. Furthermore, students see the advantage
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Looking Backwards: Tradition, the Temporal, and the Timeless CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-07-03 Jeraldine R. Kraver
Abstract: Our “Looking Backwards” selection continues to honor our promise in the 80th anniversary issue of The CEA Critic: to reprint past matters from the journal—articles, essays, notices, photos—and juxtapose them against the themes or topics pursued in the issue at hand. Typically, identifying the reprint involves starting with a present issue and then searching through the journal’s archives
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Notebooking Embodied Sonico-Musical Experience CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-07-03 Steve Lamos
Abstract: This essay argues that notebooking practices—regular, routine writing about everyday experience—focused on the felt experiences of sonic / musical activity can be used to generate new forms of becoming and being. To do so, I begin with how such notebooking constitutes a daily, habitual, and revelatory practice. I then describe how notebooking is a potentially unique means of exploring the
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D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, and the Meaning of the Mythical Method CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-07-03 Charles Sumner
Abstract: There is a discrepancy between evidence of T. S. Eliot’s respect for D. H. Lawrence and F. R. Leavis’s account of their diametrical opposition. My goal is to establish and spell out the reasons for Eliot’s ambivalent posture. On the one hand, I argue that both authors tried to reconcile the contradiction between social unity and individual freedom, and they did so by resolving it into more
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Note from the Editors CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Pete Kratzke, Jeri R. Kraver
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Note from the Editors Pete Kratzke and Jeri R. Kraver Friends of The CEA Critic: In the issue before you, you will note that we have made some changes in our design. With the help of our colleagues at Johns Hopkins University Press (a special nod to Henry Richards and Carol Hamblen), we are sporting a new logo, a new cover design, and
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They Don't Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, Diane Miniel
Abstract: This paper analyzes the results from a think-aloud reading study designed to test the reading comprehension skills of 85 English majors from two regional Kansas universities. From January to April of 2015, subjects participated in a recorded, twenty-minute reading session in which they were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator
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Perceiving the Human through the Nonhuman: Posthumanism in Issac Asimov's The Bicentennial Man CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Hawk Chang
Abstract: Since the late twentieth century, stories of humanoid robots have undermined a clear-cut boundary between humans and nonhumans. Traditionally, the mainstream opinion has been dominated by human-centered discourse, in which robots are invariably nonhumans that are characterized by inferiority, servitude, and lack. This mindset to subordinate robots as servants is outdated, evidenced by Issac
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Illustration as Simile: Conversations between Visual and Textual in Tales from Shakespeare CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Nina Elisabeth Cook
Abstract: The relationship between word and image reached new levels of complexity with the rise of illustration in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scholars in recent years have argued for the visual arts as not merely a means of textual enrichment but also as interpretation and critique, a view particularly prevalent in studies of nineteenth-century paintings of Shakespearean subjects
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Remediation and Epistemological Revelation in the Archimedes Palimpsest and Twenty-First-Century Erasure Poetry CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Kiel M. Gregory
Abstract: Contemporary erasure poetry and the poetics of remediated forms are often taken as serving as political battlegrounds and sites of epistemic transference. At the same time, what is missing from the literature is a discussion of medieval manuscripts and the history of palimpsests. This paper explores two topics: (1) how the Archimedes palimpsest allows us to understand blackout poems as sites
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Seeing Race in Post-Racial America: Spectatorship and Visibility of the Racial Experience in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' An Octoroon (2014) CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Bomi Jeon
Abstract: This article examines the theatrical representation of race and its political implications in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon (2014), a modern reworking of Dion Boucicault’s play The Octoroon (1859). It offers a critical analysis of An Octoroon that compels readers to recognize that race, although a product of historical construction, holds significant real-world implications. The discussion
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Looking Backwards: Trollope is Trending CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Jeraldine R. Kraver
Abstract: Our “Looking Backwards” selection continues to honor our promise in the 80th anniversary issue of The CEA Critic: to reprint past matters from the journal—articles, essays, notices, photos— and juxtapose them against the themes or topics pursued in the issue at hand. Typically, selecting the reprint involves starting with a present issue and then searching through the journal’s archives for
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On Teaching Trollope in the 'Seventies CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Charles Moran
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: On Teaching Trollope in the ‘Seventies Charles Moran (bio) In our quest for “relevant” literature, Trollope’s fiction is almost certain to be overlooked—considered amusing but a trifle tedious, perhaps good escape fiction but not, certainly, important, not significant. So it was with some trepidation that I assigned The Warden to my students
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The Spectral Famine in Anthony Trollope's Castle Richmond CEA Critic Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Hande Tekdemir
Abstract: Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond (1860) is one of the period’s rare novels on the Irish Famine written by an English writer. In the rapidly changing society of the long nineteenth-century England, the novel form had gradually assumed a social function that interrogated unprecedented progress caused by rapid urbanization, industrialization, and imperialism, albeit from a conventionally middle-class
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Editor's Introduction: The CEA Conference in San Antonio: A Pivot Point CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Jeraldine R. Kraver
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Editor's IntroductionThe CEA Conference in San Antonio: A Pivot Point Jeraldine R. Kraver The CEA Conference in San Antonio: A Pivot Point To those of us of a certain age, the definition of pivot immediately conjures the sport of basketball and the act of rotating on one's stationary foot. More recently, though, the word has been used
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Gossip at the Quilting Bee: A Crucial Form of Solidarity in Nineteenth-Century America CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Susanna Kelly Engbers
Abstract: Just as the cloth was transformed and became defined as a quilt, so, too, the special qualities of the quilting bee supported the transformation of quilters into defined, agential groups. Indeed, the historical context of both quilting bees and quilt-making is significant, the activities at their peak of popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, the same time as the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—generally
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An Orchestrated Awakening: Latent Irish-ness at the Heart of Yeats's Seminal Work CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Jaclyn Maria Fowler
Abstract: "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is more subtle than the poet's more myth- and folklore-facing poems like "Cuchulainn's Fight with the Sea" and "A Faery Song." Yet, it fits squarely in the realm of the nineteenth-century movement known as the Celtic Revival. At its core, the movement sought to reestablish the rich artistic and folkloric traditions of the Irish that had long been outlawed under
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Circumventing "Hostipitality": The Enduring Legacy of 19th-Century Choctaw Nation and Irish Solidarity CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Lynée Lewis Gaillet
Abstract: The abiding legacy between the Choctaw Nation and Irish citizens stems from a small act of kindness in the 19th century. Following their forced migration during the 1830s, aptly remembered as the Trail of Tears, the Choctaw Nation donated $710 in 1847 ($26,468.37 in 2023 currency) to address Irish poverty resulting from the potato famine (Howe and Kirwan, xxvii). This act of benevolence established
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The End Is Always Near: Evaluating the Influence of Premillennial Apocalyptic Rhetoric on Evangelical Christian Attitudes toward Climate Change Discourse CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-11-15 David Gall-Maynard
Abstract: One recurring feature of climate change discourse—and apocalyptic rhetoric more generally—is the appeal to textual authorities whose knowledge transcends that of rhetor and audience. "For religious apocalyptic," Brummett writes, "the grounding text will be one or more of the scriptures of the religion; for secular apocalyptic, the grounding text will be the assertion of a natural law governing
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Composing an Anti-Racist Academy: Re-Imagining Systems and Structures in a First-Year Writing Program CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Daniel Collins, Meghan Gilbert
Abstract: As white academics engaging in anti-racist education, we work from a stance of transparency, humility, and constant self-interrogation. It's important to have white instructors and administrators engaging in the labor of dismantling academic systems of oppression, if only because there are so many of us. A legacy of racist hiring and promotion strategies means that, even now, roughly 70%
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The Impossibility of Postmemory in Diasporic Anglophone Lebanese Texts CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Syrine Hout
Abstract: Marianne Hirsch maintains that literature based solely on "postmemory"—that is, second-hand memories passed down from a generation that experienced a collective trauma to a subsequent one that did not—is qualitatively different because it is connected to its object of study not through recollection but through an imaginative investment. Following this definition, Lebanese writings stemming
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Convergence: Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methods in English Studies for Undergraduate English Majors CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Joyce Kinkead
Abstract: No doubt the concept of "Writing Intensive" (WI) courses is familiar. In addition to WI, our institution also requires "Quantitative Intensive" (QI) courses for graduation, based on the belief that literacy in numbers is also important for professionals and an educated citizenry. In essence, QI means math/stat across the curriculum, paralleling writing across the curriculum. Each department
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The Eighteenth-Century Chaucer and the Rewriting of English History CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Eric Larson
Abstract: The resulting modernization of every Chaucerian tale between 1700 and 1795 is a remarkable achievement for many reasons. For one, it represents a preoccupation with medieval themes in the late-Stuart and Georgian eras, both in terms of the tedious work performed and the literary market that continuously supported it. In addition, the way these poets modernized the tales, by sticking only
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Re-Assessing Our Colonial Heritage: The Controversial Memorialization of Hannah Duston CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Kathleen McEvoy
Abstract: Hannah Duston might be a footnote in our literary and colonial history, but her narrative demonstrates the power that stories have to drive people's beliefs. Those who view her monuments, when they are not defaced, come away thinking that she was a hero who triumphed over the Indians who kidnapped her and murdered her baby, but that is only part of what happened. The full story raises complicated
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The Poet in the Natural World: Dissolving Epiphanies in the Poetry of W. S. Merwin CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Dean Mendell
Abstract: Merwin was a Buddhist, and aspects of Buddhism and transcendental Romanticism mingle in his nature poetry. His poems are fundamentally Romantic but differ in two ways. Coleridge suggests in The Friend that we choose to feel alienated because "we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought" (520). For Merwin that
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Labor-Based and/or Rubric-Based? Examining the Effects of a Hybrid Grading System in the Composition Classroom CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Elizabeth N. Tran
Abstract: Both labor-based and rubric-based grading systems attempt to mitigate subjectivity in the assessment of writing, and while each method has their advantages, they also come with a slew of weaknesses. Scholars such as Asao B. Inoue, Laura Gibbs, and Denise Krane support labor-based grading because this method reinforces process pedagogy, which, Chris M. Anson comment, helps "students engage
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Contributors CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-11-15
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors DAWN BURNS received her M.F.A. from the University of Notre Dame. She teaches in the First-Year Writing Program at Michigan State University and is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. Burns is the founder and co-organizer of the_SwampFire Retreat for Writers and Artists. She has received an Ohio Arts Council Individual
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Awakening Ecological Consciousness in Conrad Richter's Ohio Trilogy CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-07-15 Marianne Cotugno
Abstract: The environmental concerns of Richter's fiction are the concerns of the early 20th century and many expressed in Richter's novels echo [Aldo] Leopold's own. Richter dramatizes the effects of deforestation, poor land management, predator control, and overhunting. Although the trilogy begins with a depiction of settlers' minds narrowing, as Leopold asserts, by the end, a transformation has
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Sugared Death: Poison and Gender in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-07-15 Susan Farrell
Abstract: The Balham mystery carries many elements that would make their way into We Have Always Lived in the Castle: a wealthy family with troubled personal relationships; a case in which the cause of death is clearly identified as poison, but no one is ever convicted of a crime; sensational coverage in the press; and perhaps most importantly, an exploration of gender politics within the home. This
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Dystopia in Disguise: Disintegrated Societies in Manjula Padmanabhan's Harvest and Lights Out CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-07-15 Sunghee Pak
Abstract: The two worlds created by Padmanabhan have further significance in that they demonstrate how dystopia is embedded in reality, making it more relevant to the contemporary audience. Harvest sets itself up as a fictional dystopia while keeping enough reality for the contemporaries to recognize; Lights Out, on the contrary, begins as a realistic drawing room drama that initiates itself from a
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Looking Backwards: Do Genres Blend or Do They Bleed? CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-07-15 Jeraldine R. Kraver
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Looking Backwards:Do Genres Blend or Do They Bleed? Jeraldine R. Kraver Our "Looking Backwards" pairing continues to honor our promise in the 80th anniversary issue of The CEA Critic (November 2018): to juxtapose a representative essay from the themes and topics pursued in the issue at hand against a reprinted essay, notice, or even photo
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China Miéville: Radical SF, Nostalgic Utopianism, and the Politics of the Past CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-07-15 Eric Sandberg
Abstract: Miéville has never claimed that his politically informed, anti-authoritarian, radical SF is a literary innovation. Instead, he locates his work within an older tradition; he is, as he has explained, "staking out remembered territory" rather than exploring new ground (qtd. in Gordon, "Revelling" 367). Miéville's overall literary project can thus be seen as a form of radical remembering, a
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A Few (Hopefully Final) Words on "The New Wave" (Originally published in the 1974 special issue of The CEA Critic) CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-07-15 Harlan Ellison
Abstract: All it was (he said for the thousandth time), was a plateau time for speculative fiction. A new generation of writers needed fresher ways to tell more relevant stories, and without benefit of salon, left bank, coffee house or writers' colony, individual talents of all ages, several sexes, many different backgrounds and disciplines caused a self-fulfilling prophecy. They caused to be created
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Teaching Shakespeare Using Dialogic Literary Argumentation CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-07-15 Matt Seymour
Abstract: Despite Shakespeare's appeal, many students remain skeptical. In response, I begin my English language-arts methods class by asking my preservice teachers this question: "Why do we still teach Shakespeare?" When my preservice teachers' future students inevitably ask them, "Why are we reading a 400-year-old play written by some dead white guy?" I want them to be able to respond with a clear
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Re-Vision of History: Historiographic Metafiction in Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-02-25 William Clough
Abstract: Rather than simply accept the "official" historical record, historiographic metafiction reexamines these records and events in showing different perspectives. This creates a dialogue between the text of the novel and the original texts of history, forcing the reader to examine more closely the texts being presented in both the "official" record and the novel. Two novels that operate along
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Gangster Cinema on a Vaudeville Stage: George's Mediated Perception of Reality in Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers" CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-02-25 Wei Feng
Abstract: To be specific, through situating Hemingway's media-embedded narrative in a larger media environment of the 1920s, I argue that the killers construct their earlier menacing situation via performing conventions of cinematic gangsters, which indeed intimates Nick and George. However, their failure of performance in the later part of the story triggers George's reframing of them as the comic
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Corpus Linguistics Pedagogy for Native Speakers: Using Corpora to Develop Advanced Writers CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-02-25 Emily J. Pucker
Abstract: Corpus study is a method that is very common in the fields of ESOL and applied linguistics. It is widely used and has a variety of functions, including discovering common collocates (words that often appear together, revealing typical usage and phrases). However, while corpus study is well-known and well-studied, it has remained largely the purview of ESOL, rarely if ever being used in research
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Laurence Sterne's Letters and Sermons: Glossing the Themes of Tristram Shandy CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-02-25 Richard C. Raymond
Abstract: Here, I shall analyze not only Sterne's letters but his sermons deliberative and judicial discourse to his parishioner-friends. In doing so, Sterne created in such texts a gloss of Tristram Shandy and its thematic center: the diseases of pride and malice as well as the cures for these ills found in laughter and friendship (1:19,32;4:401). Even while my analysis will echo the claims of other
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On the Threshold of Education: Race and Antebellum Schooling in the Text and Context of the Colored American CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-02-25 Douglas Terry
Abstract: I examine African American educational writing in the Colored American newspaper against the backdrop of white notions about common schooling. Along the way, I explore how the fusion of racial and educational discourses combine with social factors to influence competing conceptions of the common schoolhouse in the antebellum North. White reformers, despite employing the democratic language
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Looking Backwards: Okay, Professor Boomer CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-02-25 Jeraldine R. Kraver
Abstract: With the canon expanding (if not exploding), authors like Crane and even Hemingway and works like "The Blue Hotel" (1898) and "The Killers" (1927) received less and less critical attention. To be clear, that is not a bad thing: new voices, fresh voices, rediscovered voices enrich our understanding of not just American literature but of the American experience. At the same time, as Princeton's
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'The Blue Hotel' and 'The Killers' CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-02-25 J.A. Ward
Abstract: The various points of similarity between "The Blue Hotel" and "The Killers" relate to the mutual theme of the impersonality and the inevitability of evil. In neither story is murder an isolated event, but a demonstration of the evil inherent and inevitable in human society, of the violence beneath the tranquil surface of modern civilization.
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Disabled Bodies and Ableist Ideology in The Hunger Games Film Trilogy CEA Critic Pub Date : 2023-02-25 Hyun-Joo Yoo
Abstract: Yet, there has been no research thoroughly examining how The Hunger Games film trilogy, in both obvious and subtle ways, expresses widely accepted ableist concepts of and perspectives on disability and people with disabilities. Given as much, I apply critical disability studies as the primary theoretical frame, will carefully explore and discuss how The Hunger Games films can be regarded
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Editor's Introduction: The Greatest City in Alabam' CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-12-02 Jeraldine R. Kraver
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Editor’s Introduction: The Greatest City in Alabam’ Jeraldine R. Kraver One of the joys of the annual CEA Conference is that it often visits cities that surprise. I’m not talking about such places as St. Petersburg (in my experience, 2003 and 2018), New Orleans (1996, 2007, and 2019), or San Antonio (1998, 2006, 20102023). Those sorts
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A Message from Stacy Bailey, Second Vice President and Organizer of the 52nd College English Association Annual Conference CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-12-02
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: A Message from Stacy Bailey, Second Vice President and Organizer of the 52nd College English Association Annual Conference Click for larger view View full resolution Confluence March 30 – April 1, 2023. San Antonio, Texas In 2023, the CEA will return to beautiful San Antonio, Texas, for its annual gathering of scholars and teachers. In
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Like a Lamb to the Slaughter: Unjust Censorship in Tales from Shakespeare CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-12-02 Nina Elisabeth Cook
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Like a Lamb to the Slaughter: Unjust Censorship in Tales from Shakespeare Nina Elisabeth Cook (bio) On September 22, 1796, Mary Ann Lamb, the sister of famed essayist Charles Lamb, stabbed and killed her mother in a fit of insanity. Surprisingly, she was not sentenced to death for this vicious attack and, instead, spent mere months in
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Style Matters: Revitalizing the Study of Style CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-12-02 Bonnie Devet
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Style Matters: Revitalizing the Study of Style Bonnie Devet (bio) Style—once the vital third canon of rhetoric—has, unfortunately, undergone a slow decline over the centuries. During the Renaissance, style became associated with excess, such as the Renaissance’s notoriously long list of schemes and tropes. It was further reduced in importance
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No Timeline is Sacred: The Performance of Power and Authority in Loki CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-12-02 Kevin Drzakowski
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: No Timeline is Sacred: The Performance of Power and Authority in Loki Kevin Drzakowski (bio) We have now entered the multiverse. This fact should be obvious to anyone who has been keeping an eye on recent box office figures. Spider-Man: No Way Home netted Sony Pictures over 600 million dollars in profit (D’Allesandro) while Dr. Strange
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The Puritan Dream and Its Counter Voices: How Joy Harjo's American Sunrise Reenvisions John Winthrop's American Exceptionalism CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-12-02 Sarah M. Eshelman
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The Puritan Dream and Its Counter Voices: How Joy Harjo’s American Sunrise Reenvisions John Winthrop’s American Exceptionalism Sarah M. Eshelman (bio) With the colonization of what is now called the United States of America came a vision for how the settler community is supposed to operate. This vision, which will be referred to as the
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Michael Field's Transgressively Androgynous Lesbian Lyrics from Long Ago CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-12-02 Leslie A. Haines
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Michael Field’s Transgressively Androgynous Lesbian Lyrics from Long Ago Leslie A. Haines (bio) The 1889 book of poetry titled Long Ago, by Michael Field, is not a collection of poems composed by a male poet. Field is the pseudonym for a romantically entwined aunt and niece pair of poets and playwrights, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper
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The Tangled Bank: Nature as Via Media in Charlotte Smith's The Emigrants: A Poem in Two Books (1793) CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-12-02 Jeffrey E. Jackson
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The Tangled Bank: Nature as Via Media in Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants: A Poem in Two Books (1793) Jeffrey E. Jackson (bio) My thinking about Charlotte Smith’s 1793 The Emigrants: A Poem in Two Books comes out of a course on British Romanticism I taught in fall 2021. Subtitled “Righting Injustice, Writing Social Justice,” the course
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"You think / It's a happy beat?": Hughes's "Dream Boogie" CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-12-02 Joseph P. Jordan
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: “You think / It’s a happy beat?”: Hughes’s “Dream Boogie” Joseph P. Jordan (bio) Langston Hughes’s “Dream Boogie,” the first poem in the 1951 book-length sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred, is a wonderful poem to help students think about what poetry, in particular formal verse, can do for us. In my experience, students do not merely
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Water and Light: Erasure and Recovery in the Work of Tracy K. Smith CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-12-02 Carolyn Kyler
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Water and Light: Erasure and Recovery in the Work of Tracy K. Smith Carolyn Kyler (bio) Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019, is part of a distinguished tradition of African American poet-autobiographers, from Langston Hughes and Claude McKay to Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, and Elizabeth Alexander. In this
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The Negro Laborer: William Hooper Councill and the Rhetoric of Compromise CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-12-02 Theresa McWilliams-Wessels
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The Negro Laborer: William Hooper Councill and the Rhetoric of Compromise Theresa McWilliams-Wessels (bio) By 1887, William Hooper Councill had been president of the State Normal and Industrial School of Huntsville, Alabama, for 12 years and had taught for 20 years. He filed suit against the federal government in a landmark discrimination
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Doing Posthumous Justice: The Voices of the Dead in Rosenbaum's The Golems of Gotham CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-12-02 Craig Smith
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Doing Posthumous Justice: The Voices of the Dead in Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham Craig Smith (bio) I want to begin my discussion here by reflecting briefly on this year’s conference theme. Justice is a concept perennially relevant yet always elusive; as such, it is unsurprisingly the condition to which many literary works aspire. Nevertheless
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Contributors CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-12-02
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors NINA ELISABETH COOK is a doctoral candidate at Rice University. Her ongoing dissertation, Engaging Frames and Absorbing Names: The Interpolation of the Subject in Visual and Verbal Art, 1760–1880, analyzes the interaction between art (both visual and verbal) and audience through the framework of immersion. She presently serves
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Editor's Introduction: The Rocky Mountain CEA's Pop-Up Conference CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-10-03 Jeraldine R. Kraver
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Editor’s Introduction: The Rocky Mountain CEA’s Pop-Up Conference Jeraldine R. Kraver The idea for this special issue of The CEA Critic was born at the annual gathering in 2021 of the Rocky Mountain CEA (RMCEA). RMCEA is one of 14 CEA affiliates across the United States and the Caribbean, many of which sponsor regional conferences and
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Editor's Comments about the Cover Photograph: Brier Patch by Hugh Hayden CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-10-03 Jeraldine R. Kraver
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Editor’s Comments about the Cover Photograph: Brier Patch by Hugh Hayden Jeraldine R. Kraver The cover for this special issue of The CEA Critic is generously provided by artist Hugh Hayden and New York’s Madison Square Park Conservancy (MSPC). The photograph is of Hayden’s public artwork Brier Patch, installed in the park from January
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The Textbooks Are Too Damn High: Calling for a More Nuanced Evaluation of OERs CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-10-03 Brandy Bagar-Fraley
Abstract: As a response to rising textbook costs, the emergence of Open Educational Resources (OERs) has been welcomed by many institutions, teachers, and students. OERs are a free alternative to the traditional textbook, one that promises both access and equity. However, without care, the implementation of OERs can complicate or even worsen the problem they are meant to solve. In particular, the current
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Clearing the Hurdles: Concrete Steps To Helping Students Overcome Academic Struggles CEA Critic Pub Date : 2022-10-03 Stacy Bailey
Abstract: The students who arrive to our college classrooms are in many ways a mystery. They come from different places, with unique experiences and varied abilities. They have skills, strengths, and struggles we cannot know from examining a list of names on a roster. And we must teach them all. Nonetheless, there are some things we do know about them. We know that they are, for the most part, adolescents