Ethics - Widener University

More Information on CEA 2008
The clean, elegant lines of the St. Louis Gateway Arch rise high above the
Mississippi River, a literal representation of the city’s most famous epithet,
“Gateway to the West.” Inspired by this image, CEA pays tribute to St.
Louis and to the many pioneers who passed through its threshold, risking
the world they knew for nothing more (or less) than the promise of a new
beginning. Our theme for the 2008 conference is Passages.
We could have chosen various terms to investigate this theme--travel,
sojourn, migration--but the word “passages” not only suggests the many
journeys we hope to explore in literature and film, but also signals the importance
of the transitional moment, when one must leap into the unknown
and face/embrace the change that follows. Poets, novelists, dramatists,
and directors have long been drawn to the idea of a rite of passage. Heroic
quests, mythic journeys, and coming-of-age narratives abound in both classic
and contemporary works: Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse, Dickey’s Deliverance, Camus’s Black Orpheus, Hurston’s Their Eyes
Were Watching God, to name but a few. Travel literature follows suit, pairing
literal passages (from covered wagon to rocket ship) with characters’ inner
journeys. Think Homer’s Odyssey, Cather’s The Song of the Lark, Kerouac’s On
the Road, Forster’s or Whitman’s Passage to India. Even the fantastical trips of
Wells’s Journey to the Center of the Earth or Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Dark
ness provide another lens through which to analyze human folly, ambition,
and desire. Of course, presenters need not explore a work solely devoted to
this theme. Papers focused on the image itself would be welcome, for surely
some new insight still waits to be discovered in the dark tunnel of the tardy
white rabbit or the haunted chasm of Kubla Khan.
More important, the theme suggests the way our profession analyzes and
memorializes these literary and cinematic journeys. Regardless of our theoretical
backgrounds, we have all been trained as close readers. We privilege
the passage, often with joy. Who doesn’t know the pleasure of a “red wheel /
barrow / glazed with rain”; the taste of a tea-soaked Madeleine; the philosophical
ruminations of a melancholy Dane? We believe that sometimes the
part is worth more than the whole, and we celebrate that part in our classroom.
Join us.
40 More Info on the 2008 theme