Editor’s Introduction Jeraldine R. Kraver 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] Jeraldine R. Kraver University of Northern Colorado Copyright © 2019 College English Association

“One area of study that may further understanding both the histories of pedagogy in composition and literature concerns centers on Catholic schools run by women religious. While Cinthia Gannett and John Brereton’s rich anthology of essays on the rhetorical tradition within the Jesuit education begins to explore the effect Catholic educators have had on American rhetorical education, less researched is the tradition of English education in schools taught by Catholic women religious--commonly termed “nuns.” Although Carol Mattingly and Nan Johnson have begun to address some of this evolution, there is still much to understand, especially because these women’s schools were influenced by but were independent from many of the other movements in American rhetorical education.”

"Unlike Paris, with its established community and conventions, in Spain, Hemingway began to rethink expatriation as a form of authentic cultural engagement rather than merely a translation of American values into a European setting (as was the case in Paris). Hemingway highlights the difference in these two forms of expatriation in his first Spanish-set novel, The Sun Also Rises, which centers on an American expatriate who enters into a local community in Spain and his fellow expatriates who invade and corrupt the local culture."

"While she lives in Garden Heights, a predominantly poor, black neighborhood, she attends a rich, mostly white private high school called Williamson Prep. Herein lies one of the novel's central tensions; since the two worlds Starr inhabits are in a sense opposite, she must split herself to function in each one. Garden Heights Starr is at home in the black, poor community; Williamson Starr is amid the multitude of rich, white peers. To do so, the protagonist uses sneakers to cross realms, so to speak, allowing the shoes to act as material representations of the social and racial boundaries she traverses daily. I wish to analyze how Starr uses sneakers to cross these lines between her school and home. In the novel, Thomas confronts the racist institutions that determine color lines and implements specifically black cultural symbols and capital to serve as foils to the racist ideologies."

"In thinking about Magical Realism in literature, readers might envision works fraught with a sense of the fantastic—in short, any kind of narrative invested with magical undertones. The term 'Magical Realism' was originally coined by Franz Roh in 1924 to describe 'the new paintings' return to realism after Expressionism's more abstract style' (15). Magical Realism, applied to Latin American literature, has a different connotation from the one Roh originally envisioned. Scholars in the region use the descriptor to speak about the literary works of the authors of the 'Boom Generation' (Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortazar, and Gabriel García Márquez, among others) as well as to examine the narratives the pre-Boom Cuban writer, Alejo Carpentier, describes in his examination of the real maravilloso (Marvelous Realism), the genre which paved the way for Magical Realism."

“The actuality of being transgender demonstrates the flexibility of supposed facts of ourselves and prompts imagining how one might transition other identity categories as well. These speculative transitions foster thinking about extant human realities from different angles, as well as unsettle assumptions regarding what and whom we value. My pedagogy builds on these trans concepts and brings in critical pedagogy, which focuses on students holistically. By combining these theoretical approaches with analyses of narratives about transition, I strive to give students a shared vocabulary and textual references to discuss abstract concepts of identity and recognition.”

Pierce possesses a fertile imagination. "I've always enjoyed making things up," he says (personal interview). In his fiction, he has created worlds that require characters to confront their confusions and readjust their thinking about ultimate meanings. What is the nature of reality? Why are we here? Is there a world beyond the material one? Is death the end or a new beginning?

The American Frontier and Edward Bellamy's Utopian Imagination Yeonsik Jung (bio) Edward Bellamy's first important biographer, Arthur E. Morgan, identified the end of the frontier, along with the mass influx of immigrants and the consequent class struggle, as the sources of social and economic stresses in the late-nineteenth-century United States that impelled the writing of Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888) (209–10). More recent scholars have followed suit. Darko Suvin labels Bellamy's utopia in Looking Backward as a "new frontier, replacing the West traversed by the irreversible rails" (59). Similarly, Matthew Beaumont notes, "In the absence of uncolonized space, Bellamy's utopian vision, appropriately enough, centred on a man who penetrates a temporal frontier and, consequently, helps to build a perfect community in the future rather than in some hitherto untouched geographical territory" (41). The notes by these critics about the frontier, however, are in passing and not a matter of extended consideration. In fact, as Richard Slotkin points out, Julian West, the young well-to-do and settled Bostonian is "a most un-Frontier-like hero," and no explicit mention of "the frontier" is made in the novel (Fatal 515–16). However, reading Bellamy's Looking Backward as a literary sublimation of anxiety over the diminishing frontier reveals the significance of the frontier in the shaping of this most popular example of American utopian fiction. Anti-Immigrant Xenophobia Beginning with the Great Uprising of 1877, when it became clear that workers shared too little in the prosperity of the age, labor was organizing and industrial strife in America was increasingly violent. There were nearly thirty-seven thousand strikes involving seven million workers between 1881 and 1905 (Trachtenberg 80). Looking Backward was the product of these class struggles. On May 1, 1886, factions of the nascent labor movement in support of the eight-hour day came together in Chicago for what would become the Haymarket affair, in which seven policemen and two civilians were killed during a demonstration against the McCormick Harvester Company.1 In the fall of 1886, when the Haymarket jury returned the controversial verdict that made its case a notorious example of judicial murder of immigrant workers, Bellamy sat down at his desk to draft "a method of economic organization by which the republic might guarantee the livelihood and material welfare of its citizens on a basis of equality [End Page 87] corresponding to and supplementing their political equality" (223).2 As Dr. Leete, Bellamy's persona in Looking Backward, acutely diagnoses "the widespread industrial and social troubles, and the underlying dissatisfaction of all classes with the inequalities of society, and the general misery of mankind," Bellamy supported the motives of the workers and the need for social reorganization (72). He saw "the organization of labor and the strikes" as "an effect, merely, of the concentration of capital in greater masses" (Bellamy, Looking 73). Study in Germany and early experiences as a journalist for the New York Evening Post—a newspaper known for engaging in reform movements regarding tenement evils, sanitary regulation, and corrupt politics—sharpened young Bellamy's critical eye to social ailments and shaped his socialist political stance. In the second lyceum address of 1872 at Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, he explicitly proposed socialism as the solution to the inequalities and man's "incredible inhumanity" toward man, exacerbated by capitalist exploitation, expressing a concern about widespread American antipathy to socialism (Looking 50): "Why has the name Socialist by which is designated a believer in this renovation of Society, who denies that the world ought to be administered any longer in the interests of darkness and chaos become a byword and a name of reproach?" (qtd. in Morgan 99). Although Bellamy initially engaged with the socialist cause, his sympathy was limited and thereafter declined because, John L. Thomas points out, he "disapproved their methods," distinguishing the violence of socialism from its good cause (94).3 Bellamy's 1873 Springfield Union article, "How to Strike," succinctly exhibits his ambivalent, if not contradictory, perspective on the workers and their labor movement through a paternalistic rhetoric of Christian socialism coupled with Mugwump elitism: Some business is really curtailed by the state of financial affairs, and...