Back to the Past

Abstract

Back to the Past Jeraldine R. Kraver To begin our story: publication of The CEA Critic, originally The Newsletter of the College English Association, began in 1939, a few months after the CEA was founded in December 1938. Meanwhile, for its first 30 years, the CEA met for its conference alongside its older and more established sibling, the Modern Language Association (MLA). However, in 1970, the CEA Board of Directors decided that the distinctions between the two organizations were important enough that the CEA would go its own way and sponsor an annual gathering all by itself. In his "pastoral" letter to the membership, published in The Critic (32.6), new President Edward Huberman announced, "Let me begin with the exciting venture which will launch us into the 70's with a fresh measure of independence. For the first time in its history, CEA will hold a national meeting away from the MLA." He added, "The CEA of the 70's would move in new directions and assert its integrity and independence." In that spirit, the CEA met for the first time at the University of Notre Dame on April 24 and 25, 1970. The theme for the conference was, appropriately, "Contemporary Relevance and the Teaching of Literature." The success of the CEA's inaugural meeting was affirmed in the May 1970 issue of The Critic (32.8). There, in a letter titled, "Thoughts on CEA's Notre Dame Meeting," Paul Schlueter, from the University of Evansville, affirmed that the CEA's decision to free itself from the MLA was "a wise one." In his review of the meeting, he singles out the presence of "radically minded, usually younger, teachers concerned primarily with arousing the study of literature from its torpor and into the fray for ethnic studies, women's rights, and political dedication." Highly visible among these young radicals, Schlueter notes, were a number of women who. he describes as especially forthright in their expressions of urgency in the profession's solving (or at least becoming aware of) such thorny problems as hiring women on the same prejudice-free basis as hiring men. On several occasions, a rather tactless and embarrassing letter from a male department chairman was read and discussed, with the CEA deploring such prejudicial actions in a unanimous vote. The same radicalism that inspired the first step away from the MLA in 1938 was clearly alive and well three decades later. (Gotta love the CEA!) [End Page vii] This past spring, the CEA Conference convened, just as it had a half-century previously, this time in New Orleans, where participants celebrated far more than the organization's longevity. At the heart of the gathering was an affirmation of what drives each member of the CEA, which is that there is no teaching without scholarship and no scholarship without teaching. The conference's theme, "Vision and Revision," offered an opportunity to look backwards and well as forwards, and the results did not disappoint. At the President's Forum, for example, no fewer than five former Executive Directors reflected on the place of the CEA in English studies. And, whereas many of the papers and panels focused on the work of canonical American and British writers, an equal number investigated the work of new and global voices and alternative genres. On Thursday, one could hear a paper on Dickens's Bleak House at 11:00 a.m. and another on A. K. Summers' graphic memoir, Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag, at 3:15 that same afternoon. The Program Overview is all one needed to see the organization's inclusiveness in action: panels focused on traditional areas of language and literature, composition and rhetoric, and pedagogy as well as newer fields in our discipline, including Disability and Trauma Studies and Visual and Material Culture. Young scholars, too, were far from ignored, with the Karen Lentz Madison Award acknowledging papers presented by adjunct or contingent faculty and the Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award honoring scholars-in-training. The pages of these Proceedings reflect the spirit of the 50th annual conference. As has been the case since our first Proceedings issue in 2012, the process of collecting and...