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  • Editor’s IntroductionLooking Back on Horizons: The 2014 College English Association Conference, Baltimore, Maryland
  • Peter Kratzke

After returning last spring from Baltimore, where I had attended the annual College English Association Conference, I told a colleague about my frustration over gaining an insight into an argument only when taking the time-consuming trip: why could I not have more easily gained my insight from the comfort of my own home? She responded matter-of-factly, “Oh, so you’re saying the trip did its job?” Her response cuts to the heart of how and why academic conferences matter. To argue is to take a kind of intellectual journey, but not everyone agrees. Edgar Allan Poe once noted, “The true genius shudders at incompleteness—imperfection—and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.” To this definition, my colleague would rebut that Poe might have been correct in speaking about himself, but perhaps, too, we who are not geniuses must accept incompleteness in our quest to be better thinkers, writers, and, most of all, teachers.

This Proceedings issue of the 2014 CEA Conference, which ran from March 27th through the 29th, demonstrates how conference papers almost always show the minds of their authors in motion. In this way, our authors join a long history of other authors who relish the process of composition. William Stafford, for instance, begins his “A Way of Writing,” “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” Stafford’s brain-bending insight applies as well to how these Proceedings offer a larger demonstration of the CEA’s institutional “mind” in motion, each paper representative of the conference’s topics, approaches, and voices.

As ever, what most delights about the CEA Conference is the eclectic interests of its presenters. Consider, for instance, K. Irene Rieger’s study about the fashionable—and versatile—nineteenth-century tea gown: “Garment No. 5: The New Woman Novel and the First Maternity Clothes.” Throughout our other selections, the classroom, as one would expect, is of keen interest to CEA presenters, and examples include Stacy Bailey’s “This Is Your Brain on College: Educating Students with the Brain in Mind” and Alison Bach’s “‘The Right Understanding’: Teaching Literature in the Age of SparkNotes.” In a similar vein, panels abounded at the conference about new literacies and pedagogies, and you will find here familiar [End Page 229] content taken from sometimes unfamiliar critical perspectives. For the Americanists among us, the ambiguous Ahab is central to Dean Mendell’s essay “Pious Ahab: The Conduct of a Christian in Melville’s ‘Wicked Book.’” Meanwhile, the British side is represented in two of the awardwinning essays: Emma Graner’s “Dangerous Alice: Travel Narrative, Empire, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” winner of the Best Graduate Student Paper, which examines the complicated nature of Lewis Carroll’s vision and Garrett Jeter’s “Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry: Towards a Corporeal Epistemology and Politics,” winner of the Karen Lentz Madison Award for Scholarship, which peers into the enlightened mind of Edmund Burke. Craig Hamilton and Adam M. Wassel, winner of the James R. (Dick) Bennett Award for Literature and Peace, extend the geographic and generic borders of our selections with “The International State of English in Scientific Writing” and “Perpetrator Parables: Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” “Revolution,” our featured poem by David Swerdlow, meditates on the border where personal and world history meet.

Whether the aura of Baltimore’s connection to Poe was an impetus to conference participants is hard to tell, but more than a few panels had a notably eerie feel. Jessica M. Nickel, winner of the Robert Hacke Scholar-Teacher Award, explores death imagery in Kentucky-writer Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s The Haunted Mirror, and Gabriela Vlahovici-Jones takes us all the way to Romania in “From Dread to Humor: Encounters with Death in Romanian Folklore,” in which she considers how the figure of Death, so disturbing to American audiences, can...

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