Project MUSE®: CEA Critic - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/593
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in CEA Critic.daily12026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 75 (2013) through current issueLatest Articles: CEA CriticTWOProject MUSE®CEA Critic2327-58980007-8069Latest articles in CEA Critic. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Images and Words: "The River" and Flannery O'Connor's Writing Strategy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984899
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Although mocking the idea of her own biography, Flannery O'Connor frequently mined her personal experiences for her writing. In a 1958 letter to Betty Hester, O'Connor wrote, "As for biographies, there won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy" (Habit 290–91). Yet, many scholars have identified autobiographical elements in her work, particularly in her portrayal of female characters such as Hulga/Joy in "Good Country People" (1955) and Sally Virginia in "A Circle in the Fire" (1954). For instance, Jennifer Renee Blevins suggests that O'Connor's detailed explorations of mother-daughter relationships reflect her "intense
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/593/image/coversmallImages and Words: "The River" and Flannery O'Connor's Writing Strategy2026-03-11text/htmlen-USImages and Words: "The River" and Flannery O'Connor's Writing Strategy2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®705412026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11Learning to Lie: Victorian Incrementalism, Self-Deception, and Ekphrasis in Zadie Smith's The Fraud
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984900
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Zadie Smith's The Fraud (2023) is full of ghosts. The plot guides the reader through several political and social movements in the Victorian period, leaving almost no haunting stone unturned. The novel's most critical historical contexts include the 1819 Peterloo massacre, in which civilian casualties exceeded 300, with over 12 deaths (Chandler 17); the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which freed over 800,000 slaves and then either left them to their own devices or continued the same plantation practices by other means as absentee landlords ("Slavery Abolition Act"); and the hanging of the Reverend Gordon by Governor Eyre in Jamaica, allowing him to declare martial law and justify the hanging of 350 Jamaicans who were
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/593/image/coversmallLearning to Lie: Victorian Incrementalism, Self-Deception, and Ekphrasis in Zadie Smith's The Fraud2026-03-11text/htmlen-USLearning to Lie: Victorian Incrementalism, Self-Deception, and Ekphrasis in Zadie Smith's The Fraud2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®606992026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11Repurposing the Epigraph: Transforming a 19th-Century Literary Tradition for a 21st-Century Young Adult Readership
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984901
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Books are to be call'd for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or framework. Not that the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does.When I was in college many years ago, I kept near my desk a bulletin board filled with quotations from literature courses. I inscribed some of my favorite ones, like this essay's epigraph from Walt Whitman, on correspondence cards with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/593/image/coversmallRepurposing the Epigraph: Transforming a 19th-Century Literary Tradition for a 21st-Century Young Adult Readership2026-03-11text/htmlen-USRepurposing the Epigraph: Transforming a 19th-Century Literary Tradition for a 21st-Century Young Adult Readership2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®846362026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11Community Writing in John Kani's Missing: Unraveling the Ties between Identity, Diaspora, and Traditional/Transnational Paradigms
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984902
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In post-1994 South Africa, a nation simultaneously grappling with the enduring legacies of apartheid and the rapidly accelerating forces of globalization, the concept of "diaspora" has emerged as an integral component within the national narrative. In his The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha contends that "the social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation" (3). In this way, displacement is not unidirectional but a generative process that fosters cultural hybridity and reinvention. Such fluid experiences destabilize state-centered views and trigger a rethinking of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/593/image/coversmallCommunity Writing in John Kani's Missing: Unraveling the Ties between Identity, Diaspora, and Traditional/Transnational Paradigms2026-03-11text/htmlen-USCommunity Writing in John Kani's Missing: Unraveling the Ties between Identity, Diaspora, and Traditional/Transnational Paradigms2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®404542026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11Looking Backwards: Science Fiction That Reads Like Fact
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984903
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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.I confess up front that I am not well-schooled in science fiction. Grounded as I am in the bleakness of 19th-century literary naturalism, I favor the actual over the speculative. Increasingly, however
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/593/image/coversmallLooking Backwards: Science Fiction That Reads Like Fact2026-03-11text/htmlen-USLooking Backwards: Science Fiction That Reads Like Fact2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®70532026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11Who Is An SF Writer? Special "Chap Book" Edition of The CEA Critic, Nov. 1974 (vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 46-50)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984904
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I've watched high school kids grow from an avid reading appreciation of sf to their first hesitant submission, their first sale. They may disappear soon, or become only one of many. But they may also become like Ted Sturgeon, a unique and powerfully lovely contributor. In any case there is a tremendous motivation to make the statement, the written submission. "Nobody has thought yet of this," the sf writer says when an idea comes to him, but it is not merely an outre idea that he senses germinating in his head, it is an addition, a contribution.In the sciences when experimental work reveals some law or principle previously unknown, the researcher knows he must publish his results. What scientist could determine
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/593/image/coversmallWho Is An SF Writer? Special "Chap Book" Edition of The CEA Critic, Nov. 1974 (vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 46-50)2026-03-11text/htmlen-USWho Is An SF Writer? Special "Chap Book" Edition of The CEA Critic, Nov. 1974 (vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 46-50)2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®169932026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11Novels as "Empathy Machines" in the Age of AI: Richard Powers's Bewilderment
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984905
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At a fateful moment in Richard Powers's novel Bewilderment (2021), Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist at the University of Wisconsin, approaches a colleague, Martin Currier, for help with Robin, Theo's nine-year-old son struggling after the death of his mother, Alyssa. Currier, as it happens, "was one of Wisconsin's high-profile scientists: senior research professor in neuroscience" whose lab "was exploring something called Decoded-Neurofeedback. It resembled old-fashioned biofeedback, but with neural imaging for real-time, AI-mediated feedback" (86-87). Users of Decoded-Neurofeedback (or "DecNef" in the novel's shorthand) attempt to manage their emotions consciously, a capacity especially useful for sufferers of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/593/image/coversmallNovels as "Empathy Machines" in the Age of AI: Richard Powers's Bewilderment2026-03-11text/htmlen-USNovels as "Empathy Machines" in the Age of AI: Richard Powers's Bewilderment2026-03-112026TWOProject MUSE®556812026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-11