CEA CRITIC最新文献

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 for something that sets up a conversation. Also, in reproducing our selection, we present it as closely as possible to the original.

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 empathy than others and whether empathy is always genuine or the result of readers’ social pressure to react in a certain manner. To answer these questions, cognitive psychology theories are used to examine how empathy is created—or not created—for literary characters who experience trauma in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. This analysis will involve two variables: the mental activity of readers and the mental activity of characters within a fictional text.

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 basic concerns with morality, impersonality, and tradition. This parallel explains Eliot’s attraction to Lawrence. On the other hand, I argue that the different way they framed and understood these concerns accounts for his antipathy and, in turn, sheds new light on the mythical method in The Waste Land. When considered alongside Lawrence’s work and Eliot’s judgment of it, the mythical method comes across as no glorification of the past but instead as a critique of the present for repeating it.

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 of tradition’s talent guided along the “at-handed” ease of access. Indic traditions of learning through narratives, tales as gifts, make this business obligation-free— both for the masters and disciples. Snyder’s poem is that splendid common ground on which preceptors and pupils meet and come to terms with such concepts as work, art, and wisdom. They are framed in both western and eastern cultural terms in arguing why and how the poem shows, placed within the commercial concerns of the contemporary academic, the humanities matter deeply.

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 value of writing about music. Building on this potential, I look to how the rhythmic dimensions of sonico-musical experience can create interesting forms of resonance. Finally, in way of illustration, I offer a case study of my own notebooking focused on the resonant rhythms that have appeared at the nexus of my playing drums in a part-time touring rock band while carrying out my full-time work as a composition professor.

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 traditional aesthetic and cultural values throughout the text, sound and its spatiotemporal framework establish an interpretative community among the author, the character, and the reader. In this community, silence—an extreme state of sound—and distorted sound highlight the individual memories of the suppressed people and form a contrast with the collective national memory that is put under the framework of the history of patriotism by official nationalist discourse. To reconstruct the suppressed history of the common people, Vera adopts the performance mechanism of orature by sound and thereby presents the inner monologue of the characters, which helps restore the subjectivity of the oppressed and sends out a call to the reader to participate in the reconstruction of a new history with the people as subjects. Vera’s sound presentation of the silenced Zimbabwean history is an important example of orature writing, showcasing a strong sense of historical responsibility among Zimbabwean writers and contributing to the formation of originality of African Europhone literature.

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 of knowledge production as well as conversations between polemic positions and (2) how poetic remediation can inform our valuation of the erasures situated in the Archimedes palimpsest. Through analysis of Travis Macdonald’s The O Mission Repo, Rachel Stempel’s “Natal Girl (& Other Repeat Offenses),” Molly R. Sullivan’s “Levonorgestrel,” and the Archimedes palimpsest, this paper explores how both medieval manuscripts and modern forms of poetry serve us as classroom realia, illustrating that their value extends beyond disciplinary boundaries to reveal new ways of conceiving artistic and pedagogical praxes.

• 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 new headers to our essays. Our intention in updating our look is two-fold. First, we wish to signal the transfer of Executive Editorship from Jeri Kraver, who will become Managing Editor, to Peter Kratzke, who slides seamlessly into his new role. Second, and more importantly, we look to celebrate the long history of The CEA Critic (2024 marks our 86th year in print) by incorporating a traditional Courier-looking font for essay headings (followed by a horizontal line) even while those essays reflect the ever-changing nature of our profession.

As we move into a new year, we are excited to see what lies ahead. Whatever 2024 brings, The CEA Critic will be there to take notes!

Pete and Jeri [End Page vi]

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 and then translate each sentence into plain English. Before subjects started the reading tests, they were given access to online resources and dictionaries and advised that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource. The facilitators also assured the subjects that were free to go at their own pace and did not have to finish reading all seven paragraphs by the end of the exam. As part of the study, each subject filled out a survey collecting personal data (class rank, G.P.A., etc.) and took a national literacy exam (the Degrees of Reading Power Test 10A). After the 85 taped reading tests were completed, the results were transcribed and coded.

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 something that sets up a conversation. Also, in reproducing our selection, we present it as closely as possible to the original.