The CEA Forum
Summer/Fall 2005: 34.2
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PROGRAM CHAIR'S REPORT ON THE INDIANAPOLIS CONFERENCE:
Space(s)
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When the CEA board was choosing the site of our 2005 meeting, Scott Borders—our liaison to regional affiliates—promised us that in addition to being a great regional center, Indianapolis would offer beautiful weather, fun sites, and great food. Scott was right on all counts!
CEA's 2005 national meeting hosted around 500 presentations. Beginning at 8 a.m. on Thursday, March 31 and running until 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 2, the annual conference offered members 160 panels on a fascinating range and variety of topics related to our general theme of "Space(s)." Here's a rough overview of those panels, by general type.
25 on British literature
31 on American literature
13 on African-American literature
4 on Native American literature
14 on Comparative or World literature
16 on Composition and Rhetoric
16 on Creative Writing (including panels on Creative Writing pedagogy)
5 on Technical Communication and Rhetoric
2 sponsored by the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing
22 on women's literature, women writers or gender (sponsored by the Women's Connection)
12 on Religions and Literature
8 on Literature and Law; violence, work and subjectivity (sponsored by the NYCEA)
4 on Book History & Textual Criticism
1 sponsored by Rare Book School at University of Virginia
6 on the short story
5 on theory (per se)
4 on film and popular culture
3 on the sea (SEA/CEA)
20 on pedagogy
3 on curricular challenges and solutions
3 panels on teaching with technology
3 on teacher education and pedagogy
2 panels on advising english majors
As you can see, the 2005 conference offered impressive coverage and depth. In addition to presentations by our members, our three keynote speakers—Maurice Manning (Indiana), Supriya Nair (Tulane), and Sonia Hofkosh (Tufts)—were outstanding.
Our Thursday, plenary speaker Manning—selected by W. S. Merwin for the 2000 Yale Younger Poets award—spoke to a full house on "Metaphor, the Civil Libertarian." Manning's speech offered a historical and literary perspective on the communal nature of metaphor, beginning with our own political jargon and moving to focus, in part, on the poetic technique of sixteenth-century English poet, Thomas Wyatt. Reading from others' work and his own, Manning considered the reconciliatory nature of metaphor as “a necessary means to making meaning accessible.” A version of Manning's plenary has been recently published in Volume Three of the University of Colorado's literary journal, divide.
At Friday's Diversity Lunch, Nair presented work from her current book project, Pathologies of Paradise: Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Literature. Nair's talk examined "gardens, the tropics and the Eden motif in Caribbean social life and literature." And at our Saturday All-Conference luncheon, Hofkosh addressed the "Poetics of Furniture," taking as her starting point a decoupage screen owned by George Gordon, Lord Byron. Using images of Byron's screen, Hofkosh examined the stories it represents on its surfaces—the history of theatre on one side, the culture of pugilism on the other—as well as its place as a tangible piece of furniture, one which arranges identity, especially gendered identity.
Even more importantly, conference-goers repeatedly commented on the collegiality of CEA members and the quality of discussions in panels.
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2006 Annual Conference
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I've been saying for years now that CEA is the best kept secret in academic conferences. Smart, collegial, even daring.
I started coming to CEA for no better reason than John Shawcross told me to go (but who needs a better reason?). John might have been President at the time, but he was (as always) right. I think I was hooked from the very first conference. Why?
CEA's the best place I know of to try out ideas and to get great feedback, all in a friendly, collegial atmosphere.
Perhaps it's because the typical CEA member has to know how to teach a range of topics. Most of our members—even those, like me, now at research institutions—have a long history teaching composition, world literature, upper-level courses for majors, and anything else our departments need at any given moment. We develop broad interests, and we see the connections across them. The intellectual challenges of these kinds of appointments are often under-valued in an academy which privileges a narrow, deep, but disconnected knowledge over a broad, connected one. As a result, one rarely hears the research-school mantra—“not my field”—at CEA because for the most part CEA members all know something about everything (sometimes a lot about everything). And CEA members realize that what we don't know, we might still have occasion to learn.
The benefit this offers other presenters at CEA is significant, for surprisingly often, you are presenting to scholars who know the text you are discussing. And when I say presentations get friendly responses, that's not to say that CEA members don't ask rigorous questions. In fact, I get better , smarter, harder questions at CEA than at the more specialized conferences I attend. I think the difference is one of intent: I've never gotten a question at CEA that wasn't intended to help me develop my work in profitable directions. And though occasionally we do get someone (trained at those “other” conferences) who thinks the purpose of questions is to show how much the questioner knows, pretty soon that poor soul figures out that's not what we're about.
Perhaps this is also the reason that CEA values teaching and pedagogical discussions so much. We place the value of our labor in our classrooms and in our students. Even when not specifically about teaching, CEA's scholarly papers are more applicable to my life in the classroom—alerting me to brand-new teaching tools (and how to use them), to texts I might want to read (or teach). The presentations themselves are always intellectually inventive or pedagogically creative like the presentation I've never forgotten on commonalities between Chaucer and a important Aztec poet.
As I've gotten older, CEA has also become a meeting-place for me and colleagues who have moved to other institutions or who are in other fields. We have common ground at CEA—each of us able to find plenty to hear about in our own fields, while still being at the same conference. And I've also developed CEA-friends, those colleagues I see only once a year, but whose friendliness, kindness and wit make each year a valued and memorable event.
If, dear reader, you have been to a CEA conference before, then you know what I'm talking about. But if you are new to our organization, you are in for a treat, and I hope you find your experiences here as welcoming, friendly, and challenging as I have always found mine.
I have been honored to serve this year as President.
Ann
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Ann Hawkins is the current President of the College English Association. She teaches at Texas Tech University, where she specializes in Bibliography, Book History, and Textual Studies. Her scholarly editions of Henrietta Temple (1836) and Venetia (1837) were recently published as part of Pickering & Chatto's series, "The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli" (2004); her edition of Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington's Victims of Society (1837) will appear in Pickering's series of "Silver Fork Novels" (2005). In addition to her editorial work, Dr. Hawkins has articles on Disraeli, nineteenth-century women poets, Lord Byron, and the British book trade in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Romanticism-on-the-Net, Women's Writing, ANQ , and Recent Perspectives in European Romanticism. She is currently finishing a book on Shakespearean commodification in the Romantic era titled Byron and the Shakespeare Trade.
Download the 2006 Conference Program here
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