Department of English
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Don’t Call It a Cult
Bret Anthony Johnston on his new novel, “We Burn Daylight”
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A Citizen of the Arts
James Cox Gives Cherokee Playwright Lynn Riggs His Due
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Modeling Disability Justice, One Relative Unit of Forward Movement at a Time
Alison Kafer and Julie Minich are using their institutional platform — along with a financial boost from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — to make waves in the field of disability studies
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Falling for Vertigo
Students in Doug Bruster’s “‘Vertigo’ In Context” course take film analysis to new heights.
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Extra Credit: Why Comics Matter
“Pyroclast,” Professor Latinx, and 12 comics to prove a point
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Art, Science, and the Wide World of Infowhelm
Overwhelmed by information about climate change? Heather Houser has a word for a that, and a possible solution: Art.
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Austen in Austin
When UT Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, world-renowned for its rare books and manuscripts, wanted to tell a fresh story about Jane Austen, it needed to team up with an Austen scholar willing to go places the HRC couldn’t. That scholar? Janine Barchas.
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At Winedale, The Show Goes On
Students in UT Austin’s famous Shakespeare at Winedale program often push theater’s “the show must go on” maxim to the edge. Now director James Loehlin faces an offstage challenge, but his commitment to Winedale isn’t wavering.
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The McCrackenaissance
A few things to know about Elizabeth McCracken: She’s hilarious on Twitter. She likes to spend her mornings swimming in Austin’s Barton Springs Pool. She’s not wild about the term “autofiction,” and her new book, “The Hero of This Book,” is definitely a novel, not a memoir.
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Remembering UT’s World-Class Creative Writing Professor, Zulfikar Ghose
Ghose was the author of more than twenty-five books and his range was wide: fiction, poetry, and criticism. As a novelist, he challenged the limits of traditional realism with innovation in structure and language. But he’s also remembered by many as a generous and warm colleague and mentor.
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Why I teach a course connecting Taylor Swift’s songs to the works of Shakespeare, Hitchcock and Plath
Analyzing Swift’s writing will hopefully help my students recognize how certain poetic and literary devices operate in older texts – as much as those same books and poems from the past help them appreciate Swift’s art at a deeper level. Swift, like all artists, is part of a great tradition, and she calls upon it to…
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The Bell Tolls for WHOM: The complicated fate of the stuffiest object pronoun
Whom is dying out … mostly. As an essential part of grammatical English, that stuffy, old-fashioned object pronoun is declining in usage, and has been for more than a century. As a stylistic marker, though, it has some life left.
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The Way of Roger
Roger Reeves’ latest poetry collection, Best Barbarian, is part jazz song, part fever dream, part mythic reimagining. “For me, the barbarian is the achievement of something that is recognizably outside and potentially threatening, not because it seeks to be but just because it’s making a way and a life of being possible. It’s about self-love.…
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The Taylor Swift Songbook Course Swiftly Makes Over English 314
Professor of English Elizabeth Scala teaches a lower-division course in Liberal Arts Honors, E314L: “Literary Contests and Contexts,” nearly every fall. For fall 2022, Scala decided to structure the course around an unusual literary figure: Taylor Swift.
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Leaf Through a Good Book
Keep your to-read list up-to-date with our fall book list, featuring a selection of titles from College of Liberal Arts faculty members and alumni.
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Book Excerpt: Shakespeare’s Returning Warriors – and Ours by Alan Warren Friedman
Most Shakespearean tragedies begin with their titular protagonists returning, immediately or imminently, from highly successful martial combat.
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A Look at Our Latest Books
2021 Spring and Summer titles from our college community.
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Travel by the Book
Literature and life guide Peter LaSalle’s latest collection of travel essays, The World is a Book, Indeed.
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Rebooting Our Lives After COVID-19
The world’s new reality amid the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing us to confront issues and critically think about how to revive communities slowly, safely and sustainably.
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Race By Any Other Name
In her award-winning book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Geraldine Heng argues that race did exist even if the language of the time had yet to capture the phenomenon.
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Apollo: A Texas Farm Boy’s View
A simple country kid from the Rolling Plains of Texas, I had the good fortune to witness firsthand the vision, power and technical complexity that took America to the moon — perhaps the preeminent technological accomplishment in human history. I managed to graduate (with supremely ordinary grades) from The University of Texas in August 1958.…
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Defending Humanities
Legend has it that Alexander the Great fell asleep with an annotated copy of The Iliad tucked under his pillow, dreaming of Achilles. And when he led his armies into Persia, the Homeric epic and the notes of his tutor, Aristotle, were thrumming in his mind, shaping his vision of great leadership. A story, not…
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Extreme Summer: Speaking the Many Languages of Climate Change for Texas
Summer is coming. In Texas, this warning — not unlike the familiar Game of Thrones motto — makes residents vigilant. And the admonition becomes dire as summers get hotter and drier, fueling wildfires, flash floods and worse. 2017 was Texas’ second-warmest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and those temperatures…
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Sick: The Poetics of Modern Health Care
…And all the while, I kept thinking about that great old Whitman poem… ‘When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.’I…I don’t know it.Anyway…Well, can you recite it?Pathetically enough, I could. With some encouragement from Walt, Gale continues:When I heard the learn’d astronomer,When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,When I was shown the charts…
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In Memoriam: Barbara Harlow, 1948-2017
The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see, and to see, we have only to look. I beseech you to look. -Fra Giovanni Only a handful of scholars embody relevant driving forces within multiple…
