Editor’s Introduction
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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 each current issue? As such, The CEA Critic includes the first “Looking Backwards” featured essay—here, Melvin G. Williams’ 1977 piece, “Black Literature: A Stereophonic Experience for Monophonic Students.”
My second proposed feature is not so much something new but, rather, something we hope to institutionalize whenever possible and appropriate: soliciting for inclusion work by exemplary graduate students. In this issue, we include James Rankin’s essay on Don DeLillo, “The Contingency of History: Pragmatism and Approaching Historical Truth in Don DeLillo’s Libra.” James is a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland.
Taken together, our two new features to The CEA Critic should help to create continuity between the journal’s past—when it was The News Letter of the College English Association—and its present. As an organization, tradition matters to the CEA, and these two features allow us at once to look backwards from whence we came as teacher-scholars and towards the future in how a new generation of teacher-scholars advance ongoing conversations. [End Page vii]
