Ethics - Widener University

Call for Papers | CEA 2008
Passages
39th Annual Conference | March 27-29, 2008 | St. Louis, Missouri
How do we think about passages? Are they just rites we go through as we grow up? or is any
journey a passage? Are thresholds passages? Can we define what marks a passage? Is it some
personal or communal experience? How do we think about travel
For our 2007 meeting, CEA invites papers and panels that consider how we construct and understand
passages and how those understandings inform what we write, read, and teach?
We invite papers or panels on all areas of literature, languages, film, composition, pedagogy,
creative writing, business/technical writing, etc., that explore aspects of the conference theme.
Proposals may interpret the CEA theme broadly, including—but not limited to—the following
possible areas:
• Rites of Passage: physical, psychological, emotional, imaginative, cultural, relational
• Journeys: diaspora, aging, heroic quests, mythic journeys, and coming-of-age narratives
• Personal journeys: disfigurement, disability, poverty, diasposa, refugee status, discrimination,
job loss, divorce, disease, death
• Physical Passages: travels, tunnels, mountains, oceans, gaps, river-crossing, bridges
• Rhetorical Passages: tropes of rhetoric,
• Literary Passages: is the idea of close reading of a “passage” still a valid construct? how do we
identify passages for students? where does a passage begin and end?
• Spiritual Passages: the real world vs. the mystical world, metaphysical moments, liminal
perceptions, thresholds, the revelatory, transformations and transfigurations, epiphanies
• American Passages: migrants and immigrants, pioneers of expansion and settlement, pioneers
of progress, the hobo and the vagabond, the runaway, slaves/ex-slaves and abolitionists, delinquents
and reformers, the impoverished and the affluent, American dreams and dreamers,
the triumphal rise of “geeks” and “nerds,” idols and icons--American-style
• Rhetorical Passages: tropes of thetoric, constructs of discourse, configurations and conjurations,
speeches and speechifying, pulpits and soap boxes
• American Passages: migrants and immigrants, pioneers of expansion and settlement, pioneers
of progress, the hobo and the vagabond, the runaway, slaves/ex-slaves and abolitionists, delinquents
and reformers, the impoverished and the affluent, American dreams and dreamers,
the triumphal rise of “geeks” and “nerds,” idols and icons, American-style
We encourage consideration of these and other questions related to the conference theme:
• How are passages portrayed in literature and film?
• How do works of fiction, poetry, film, and memoir articulate passages?
• How does travel literature convey the idea of passages, both complete and incomplete?
• Does human response to issues of passages differ historically and regionally? How is that
response depicted in literature, film, etc.
• How are passages addressed in the English classroom, in what we read, write, research, and
teach and practice as professionals?
• How are our students challenged to consider ideas of passage?
• What role does difference (in culture, in ethnicity, in gender, in sexual preference) make in
ideas of passage?
• How do students write about passages? should they? are they able to respond critically to the
passages of their own lives?
CFP for CEA 2008 | St Louis iii