The CEA Critic (Journal)

07/06/2024

Hello friends of THE CEA CRITIC. Our FB page and all our social media is moving to join the College English Association sites. Look for even more from us there! This page will close August 1.

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12/15/2023

While you sit back and enjoy THE CRITIC"S proceedings issue from CEA in SA, take a break to REGISTER for CEA 2024 in ATLANTA!

REGISTER HERE! https://cea-web.org/conference-overview

05/14/2023

Friends our SPRING/SUMMER ISSUE (85.2!) of THE CEA CRITIC is in the works, including essays on authors as diverse (or maybe not so much) as Shirley Jackson and China Miéville!

Watch here fore more news!

04/25/2023

Congratulations goes out to all of this years NEH Awards winners!

Press Release NEH Announces $35.63 Million for 258 Humanities Projects Nationwide Photo caption New NEH grants will support preservation of the Willis E. Bell photographic archive, online access to San Diego Air and Space Museum’s collections documenting aerospace projects, a documentary film on f...

04/14/2023

For information on how to submit your best literary critiques to us, see https://www.unco.edu/hss/english/department-activities/cea-critic.

04/07/2023

The Michigan CEA is making a call for Papers for their online Zoom Conference taking place in the fall: Saturday, October 7, 2023. The Themes are “Comfort, Healing, and Hope.” Their featured speaker is humorist, essayist, and memoirist Rick Bailey. For mor information, see flyer below. To submit an article for their extensive list of topics, see their registration form (https://michigancea.org/2023/03/26/registration-form-for-the-michigan-college-english-association-online-zoom-conference-of-saturday-october-7-2023). Please direct all questions to https://michigancea.org/contact.

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Call for Papers for the Michigan College English Association Online Zoom Conference
Saturday, October 7, 2023

Themes: Comfort, Healing, and Hope

Featured Speaker: Rick Bailey, humorous essayist and memoirist*

As we emerge (or do we?) from the 2020 pandemic and shutdown, we continue to struggle with the aftereffects on our students and ourselves, while facing many other challenges: environmental, economic, social, political. Where do we find comfort? How do we heal? What gives us hope? And how can we share these good things with our students and each other? How can the classroom be a space of comfort, healing and hope? Our institutions, more broadly? How are these themes conveyed through literature–our own writing or that of others?

The Michigan College English Association invites proposals for individual papers and for complete panels for our fall 2023 Conference. We welcome proposals from experienced academics, young scholars, and graduate students. We encourage a variety of papers, including pedagogical work, scholarly essays, creative writing, as well as workshops, crafting circles, and other activity-directed sessions. All proposals will be peer-reviewed.

Here are some possible areas for presentations:


 fiction, poetry, drama, creative nonfiction
 classroom management
 curriculum development
 computer or on-line instruction
 race, class, and gender studies
 literacy
 professional expectations/evaluation/assessment
 English/writing departments and our society

 the creative process
 union/administration differences
 film studies
 textual analysis
 preparing students for the work world
 teaching composition, literature, linguistics


Conference proposals are due by September 23, 2023. Early submissions are welcome. Please send your name, university affiliation, e-mail address, time preference, and a 200-word abstract or sample of creative writing to Program Chairs Ilse Schweitzer, Nancy Owen Nelson and Lori Burlingame via email at [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] .

To submit a panel proposal, please include the information for all members (5 maximum participants) in the same proposal.

Topic Tags: call for papers, Michigan College English Association, conference, Comfort, Healing, Hope, teaching, creative writing, composition, literature, linguistics

* Rick Bailey grew up in Freeland, Michigan, on the banks of the Tittabawassee River. He taught writing for 38 years at Henry Ford College. Teaching composition online the last 15 years of his career, he wrote for and with his classes, developing voice and content that became the basis for his first collection of essays, American English, Italian Chocolate (2017) and successive collections (2019, 2021), published by University of Nebraska Press. A Midwesterner long married to an Italian immigrant, in retirement he and his wife divide their time between Michigan and the Republic of San Marino. His most recent book is And Now This: A Memoir in Essays.

04/01/2023

As International Women’s History Month comes to a close, The CEA Critic encourages you to visit these literary magazines that specialize in feminist issues—our kindred JHUP prints Journal of Women’s History, https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/journal-womens-history, and Feminist Formations, https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/feminist-formations.

To view the most recent Feminist Formations Author Guidelines, please visit their website at: https://feministformations.org/submit

03/25/2023

One last featured excerpt from our shipping publication (85.1) comes from J. A. Ward’s “‘The Blue Hotel’ and ‘The Killers’”:

“Crane wrote two fine stories,” Hemingway says in Green Hills of Africa, “‘The Open Boat’ and ‘The Blue Hotel.’ The last one is the best.” Much might be said about the influence of Crane on Hemingway in general and of “The Blue Hotel” on “The Killers”—a story which many consider Hemingway’s best—in particular. My concern, however, is with the general similarity between the two stories in theme, plot, and treatment. It is not simply that in both stories the central incident is the murder of a Swede, but that they are remarkably parallel in their dramatization of the impersonality and inevitability of evil in the world and in their ironic utilization of stereotyped violence to convey the discrepancy between the appearance and the reality of civilized society.

03/19/2023

Yet another excerpt from our shipping version (85.1). This one comes from Richard C. Raymond’s “Laurence Sterne’s Letters and Sermons: Glossing the Themes of Tristram Shandy”

Though eschewing letters from his novel during his novel-writing years, Sterne posted letters to scores of women and men to whom he offered, as does Tristram, his “Life and Opinions” as a gesture of friendship. Here, I shall analyze not only Sterne’s letters but also 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 scholars that these categories of texts parallel the thematic center of his Sterne’s fiction, I shall stress that Sterne created what amounts to a thematic gloss from a stance outside his novel. Unlike his fiction-writing contemporaries, who used letters to drive plot within their novels, Sterne’s letter-and-sermon gloss to Tristram Shandy underscores his abiding intent to challenge traditional boundaries between autobiography and fiction.

03/10/2023

Here’s another excerpt to enjoy from our shipping edition (85.1). This comes from Emily J. Pucker’s “Corpus Linguistics Pedagogy for Native Speakers: Using Corpora to Develop Advanced Writers.”

Every experienced writer knows that there are unspoken rules governing the genres in which he or she writes. The level of formality, the length, the use of headings, and the jargon are all part of these expectations and rules. Thus, any key that unlocks those unspoken rules is valuable. Researchers Jean Parkinson, Murielle Demecheleer, and James Mackay write, “A key element in acquiring a professional identity is learning to talk (and write) as members of the profession do” (31). 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 and in courses intended for writers working in their primary language. The course I taught during the Fall Semester 2019 emphasized genre study and corpus study as ways for the students to understand better a particular genre of writing and to apply this new information to their own work. This relatively novel approach to teaching writing using tools borrowed from applied linguistics opens new possibilities for learning, a fresh intervention into both pedagogy and composition studies.

03/03/2023

Here’s an excerpt from Wei Feng’s essay “Gangster Cinema on a Vaudeville Stage: George’s Mediated Perception of Reality in Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’” that’s included in the fast-approaching publication of the next CEA Critic (85.1).

A problem remains unresolved, however. In the story, there is a scene—almost a third of the entire length—in which Nick is tied up in the kitchen and thus his focus is transferred to George. What role does this change play in understanding Nick’s situation or epiphany? Many critics, such as Brooks and Warren, often overlook this scene, or, at best, suggest that it is unrealistic. Yet, Edward Stone asserts, Nick in “The Killers” is not only not on a par with Nick in other stories but he is even less important in the story than George and Sam (17). R. S. Crane further contends that Nick is no more important than George because they simply serve different functions: readers learn about the killers through George’s eyes, while Nick allows them to perceive Anderson’s situation (313). Correspondingly, Steven Carter lists the pervasive dualities and opposites in the short story, highlighting the significance of “the presence of complementarity throughout the story” (67) who pointed out in 1952 that very little in the story is what it appears to be: Henry’s, which serves no alcoholic beverages, is a converted tavern run by George; Al and Max order breakfast at a lunch counter whose menu features dinner; the orders are mixed up; the time on the clock is wrong; Mrs. Hirsch runs Mrs. Bell’s rooming house; and so on. These interpretations, by moving away from a myopic focus on Nick, foreground George’s importance. Rather than continue the well-established discussion on Nick, I propose to focus on George: if Nick is not the single protagonist, how can the story be otherwise reinterpreted? What is George’s discovery, if it exists?

02/24/2023

As African American or Black History Month comes to a close, The CEA Critic encourages you to visit these literary magazines that specialize in diaspora,

African Voices: http://www.africanvoices.com/index.html
African Writing Online: http://www.africanwriting.com/eleven/submissions.htm
Anansi: https://aalbc.com/content.php?title=ANANSI+FAQ+and+Subscription+Order+Form
Bakwa: https://bakwamagazine.com/
Brittle Paper: https://brittlepaper.com/about/
Obsidian: http://obsidianlit.org

And consider reviewing many longstanding publications unavailable online, including our kindred JHUP prints African American Review and Calaloo.

OUR TEAM AINEHI EDORO, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Brittle Paper, is Assistant Professor of Global Black Literatures at the University of Winscosin-Madison’s Department of English and Department of African Cultural Studies. She was formerly Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literatures a...