Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

Editor’s Introduction Jeraldine R. Kraver Let me confess that I am not always the best citizen of the College English Association Board of Directors. As Editor of The CEA Critic, I sit on the Board and attend both our virtual meeting in the winter and our on-site meeting the evening before the annual conference begins. Typical of such conclaves, there are reports from each of the officers (that is a total of thirteen or so) and a variety of sub-committees. During the four very long hours of the meeting, there are multiple calls to question and motions and seconds. There are seemingly endless budget items to review and policies to revise. For the CEA, the annual conference is our New Year’s Eve: March in Indianapolis was the coda to 2015. And while the Board’s eyes were now on the future and Denver in 2016, mine were growing increasingly heavy. Despite my lethargy at business meetings, Second Vice-President, Jeffrey DeLotto, grabbed my attention when he described his visit to the CEA’s archives at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana. Centenary is the home of former CEA President (and former editor of The CEA Critic) Earle Labor, Emeritus Professor of American Literature and Director of the Jack London Research Center. Although I have met Professor Labor in person only once (and he was all the gracious southern gentleman one would expect), I feel as if I know him very well because my husband—and Critic co-editor, Peter Kratzke—wrote a dissertation in which Jack London featured prominently. As far as I was concerned, Professor Labor was all but living with us in our Lexington, Kentucky, flat. Not only did I thus perk up a bit during Jeffrey’s presentation about what will become of the archives, but, when the discussion turned to CEA Historian Joe Pestino’s recollections about the founding of the organization itself, I was fully alert, even taking copious notes. Since the Board’s meeting in Indianapolis, I have discovered through a little digging of my own that the founding fathers of CEA declared their independence in 1938 from the then- and still-reigning King of Language and Literature, the Modern Language Association. In his Preface to a 1972 Peabody Journal of Education issue devoted to “A Look into the Future of College English,” Professor Labor traces how the CEA was founded “by a group of young radicals in the Modern Language Association who felt that the research-oriented MLA was slighting the concerns of teaching” (1). Reading this history, I wondered, “What did a radical English professor look like in the 1930s?” Did these young radicals meet for post-session cocktails and rage against the MLA machine? Did they gather downtown [End Page 147] at Café Society, the Bohemian hot spot in Greenwich Village? Perhaps they traveled uptown to Harlem and Minton’s, at that time the hip new jazz club. Was all the talk about Pearl S. Buck’s Nobel Prize for The Good Earth or the November pogrom in Europe, already known as Kristallnacht? In explaining how the first generation of CEA members “continued to place primary emphasis upon concerns of the frontline classroom teacher. . . “ (1), Professor Labor offers a clue about what these young CEA Turks might have been discussing (beyond the release of the first Superman comic or Bette Davis’ performance in Jezebel, that is). Given their commitment to placing teaching at the center of what we do, I like to think that what they were talking about was Louise Rosenblatt’s just-published Literature as Exploration. Six months earlier, The New Republic, identifying the work as written “chiefly for teachers of high-school and college English,” suggested that Rosenblatt had addressed social science and aesthetics in ways “unequaled by some of our best Marxists” (231)—and, after all, are not most young radicals at the very least left of center? In fact, I envision that Rosenblatt, who was teaching at Brooklyn College in 1938, might very well have been one of these young CEA radicals. Or, perhaps Mark Van Doren, who would serve as CEA President in 1945 and 1946 and was then teaching at Columbia...