Welcome Readers, Writers, Learners, and Lecturers

In 2008, Waltz with Bashir shocked the world by presenting a bracing story of war in what seemed like the most unlikely of formats—an animated film. Yet as Donna Kornhaber shows in this pioneering new book, the relationship between animation and war is actually as old as film itself. The world’s very first animated movie was made to solicit donations for the Second Boer War, and even Walt Disney sent his earliest creations off to fight on gruesome animated battlefields drawn from his First World War experience. As Kornhaber strikingly demonstrates, the tradition of wartime animation, long ignored by scholars and film buffs alike, is one of the world’s richest archives of wartime memory and witness.

Generation after generation, artists have turned to this most fantastical of mediums to capture real-life horrors they can express in no other way. From Chinese animators depicting the Japanese invasion of Shanghai to Bosnian animators portraying the siege of Sarajevo, from African animators documenting ethnic cleansing to South American animators reflecting on torture and civil war, from Vietnam-era protest films to the films of the French Resistance, from firsthand memories of Hiroshima to the haunting work of Holocaust survivors, the animated medium has for more than a century served as a visual repository for some of the darkest chapters in human history. It is a tradition that continues even to this day, in animated shorts made by Russian dissidents decrying the fighting in Ukraine, American soldiers returning from Iraq, or Middle Eastern artists commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab Spring, or the ongoing crisis in Yemen.

Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary: War and the Animated Film vividly tells the story of these works and many others, covering the full history of animated film and spanning the entire globe. A rich, serious, and deeply felt work of groundbreaking media history, it is also an emotional testament to the power of art to capture the endurance of the human spirit in the face of atrocity.

10. How many creative names there are for our women writers World Lit class. Most are too profane to repeat here—think of rhymes with feminine connotations for “lit” and “Moore”—but here’s a lovely non-dirty one: "The World is More Lit."

9. From Cecilia Handy’s thesis: that the memories that millennials have of learning to write involve standardized tests and their phones.

8. From Gabby Crank’s thesis: that there were women spies in U.S. intelligence services as far back as World War II, even when women were officially being hired only as clerks.

7. From Ana Lopez’s thesis: that the gun rights movement uses feminist slogans to market handguns to women.

6. That you can illustrate an entire children’s picture book using the Bitmoji app.

5. That the shyest student will give a bold public performance if they’re trying to do justice to their classmate’s writing, rather than their own.

4. That the combination of the words dildo and Texas will get the anti-campus-carry movement on The Daily Show.

3. That nobody wants to start class with five minutes of meditation at the beginning of the year. And that at the end of the year, meditation is what students say they’ll miss most.

2. That the fiercest activists for first-generation and undocumented students are also the most dedicated elementary school Reading Buddies.

1. That Plan II gives me the privilege, again and again, of helping students at critical moments on their paths to great things.

Keep in touch, you dazzling, starry, world-changing beings. I’ll always be proud to have been your teacher.

Our Assistant Director of Media Outreach, Sarah Welsh, chatted with Hannah Blaisdell and Emily Varnell, two undergraduate interns who have been assisting professors Jim Cox and Douglas Bruster with UT’s Texas Studies in Literature and Language (TSLL) journal this year. The journal has undergone some changes this year, including a revamped design and increased social media presence, which Hannah and Emily have been helping with.

Sarah Welsh: Tell me a little bit about what you do for TSLL, a journal of literary criticism that describes itself as publishing “substantial essays reflecting a variety of critical approaches and covering all periods of literary history.” That’s a lot of literary history to be working with!

Emily Varnell:  TSLL hasn’t done much on social media before and they’re revamping the whole journal this year including the design, so they wanted to do some social media to promote it and have more professors submit.

Hannah Blaisdell: This fall, what I did is read through the submissions that were going to be published in the journal and then I would form interview questions to give to some of the authors to give them answers so we would have more information about their work. So we would send out the questions and talk to the authors. I would also pick out images to go with some of the interviews and talked with the people that we would be interviewing as well so other scholars who had submitted.

SW: How long have you been with the journal and what have you been working on, more specifically?

EV: Hannah did it the fall semester and I worked in the spring semester. This is the first time they’ve done anything like this, but I think from what Hannah and I have done they want to continue to hire interns to help out. I imagine they’ll want other undergraduates to show interest, especially students who are in English honors and people who are interested in publishing. The essays are mostly literary theory heavy, so students writing their senior thesis would be familiar with this type of writing.

What I’ve been doing this semester is finishing up the interviews. I emailed all the authors for the 59.3 edition (Fall 2016), asking them to provide a photo of some historical artifact or something that connects to their essay and write a paragraph about it and send it in to us. Dr. Cox and Dr. Bruster are always brainstorming cool things to do. It’s not a huge time commitment for us and is a really great opportunity.

SW: What’s been your favorite part of the position?

EV: It’s really cool to have access to the journal and get to read all the articles that I wouldn’t normally.

HB: Yeah, the thing I benefited the most from was coming up with questions for all the authors. I would begin reading an article that I didn’t totally understand yet and I would need to ask the author interview questions for supplemental material. So it helped a lot with understanding texts that were a little more difficult than I would normally read. I think I grew a lot in that way.

SW: What have you been studying or working on here at UT?

HB: I’m a senior in English Honors so I’ve been writing a thesis on Virginia Woolf and one of her novels, The Years. So, I’m really interested in modernism right now. 

EV: I’m a senior too. I did the creative writing thesis a year ago, so I’m really into writing. I’m interning with Texas Monthly this semester. So I like publishing and writing and journalism and all that. But working with TSLL it’s really cool because it’s academic publishing, which is a little different. 

SW: Anything else you want to say about your time with TSLL?

HB: Something else that’s cool about this position is that you get to talk to scholars about their work and you wouldn’t otherwise as an undergraduate.

SW: It’s cool to be able to see how this stuff works from the other side.

EV: If there are any English majors out there who people are interested in publishing, this is a good thing to do- especially because social media is such a huge part of publishing right now.

UT English: Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re teaching next semester…

Caroline Barta: I’m Caroline Barta, and I’m a third-year graduate student in the English Department beginning work on my prospectus. I research early English women readers during the “long” seventeenth century (c.1598-1715). I hope to expand current perceptions about their textual communities, education, and rates of literacy.

This spring, I’m looking forward to teaching Rhetoric of the iPhone for the second time. At UT, I’ve also taught Rhetoric and Writing three times.

Some background: when I first dreamed up this course, I knew I wanted to design a writing seminar posing questions about the effect of ubiquitous technology on the “self” communicating. On the one hand, the concept was essentially pragmatic—I thought if my students felt conversant with what we were writing about (trust me when I say they teach ME things smartphones can do), it would free up space to focus on argument, style, research habits, and revision. On the other hand, simple pandering or an over-reliance on populism doesn’t make style clearer or deepen habits of reading. Critical gestures, like considering the archive, or questioning the stature of the author, text, and audience in the 21st century keeps the course from becoming two-dimensional and pushes our conversation into provocative, creative spaces.

UT: What will you be reading?

CB: In addition to reading the majority of Joseph Harris’ excellent book Rewriting  (current favorite writing “textbook”), I assign short essays, articles, blogs, podcasts, and informative videos. For instance, the course’s reading begins with two articles tracing alternative histories of the iPhone and Google’s precursor to the Android, written by Fred Vogelstein. For Apple devotees, I also post an early video of Steve Jobs discussing the naming of the iMac (and the adjectives that lie behind the “I” in the name). Typically, although students have indicated interest in a class about the iPhone, most don’t realize the prehistory of their phones. Vogelstein’s narrative of the development of the iPhone nicely parallels our first assignment, which has students looking back through the archive of their phones to write an implicit argument about an event in their lives.

UT: What is your favorite of everything you’ll be reading next semester?

CB: It’s hard to pick a favorite, though I can say that the text my fall students talked about the most in their learning record reflection portfolios was “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott. The longer I am in the writing teacher game, the more I find students who describe a mental block or a deep-seeded struggle with perfectionism, which can lead them to turn in late or incomplete work. I think it is comforting for many students to hear about successful, professional writers having the struggles they do.

It’s also entirely possible my favorite reading for this semester hasn’t been written yet. One unique feature of my course is our class social accounts (class Twitter, Wordpress blog, Instagram, etc). As part of the semester-wide “media accounts project,” students take turns being curators of the class accounts for a week. Indeed, as the iPhone celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, I expect new articles fitting our course topic will be plentiful!

UT: What will their final projects look like? 

CB: The final project is a revision of one of their three major essays into a 3-4 minute video presentation, which is screened to the entire course during presentation days. In preparation, students take a previously turned-in paper, revise it into a script, and consider the effect of adding types of rhetoric (video, auditory) to transform it into a video project. I’ve been fortunate to partner with the DWRL for the past year to provide in-class workshop help. I’m going to share three final projects, which perhaps gives you a sense of the extraordinary content produced this semester.

The first, Sean’s, is a nuanced consideration of the “socio-cultural” impact of the authorship of Kanye West and Chance the Rapper.

Sofia’s video argues the 2016 reimagining of “Where is the Love” is a Foucauldian-esque revelation of the power of the author-function, where the power of the text is related to the power we assign to author-figures. She forwards this argument by continuing this revelation by having UT students join in as author-figures (class cameos included…!). (Here’s the link:) 

Finally, Kourtney’s video considers the connective tissue of streaming platforms, nostalgia, and classic 80s movies, in her perceptive analysis of Stranger Things.

UT: What’s one of the most important things you want your students to take away from this class? Or, what do you hope they’ll get out of it?

CB: I tell my students that writing well is a basic communication skill that will improve their future—regardless of their chosen path. On the final day of last semester, I asked them what they would take away. I was thrilled to hear that my class had shaken up their view of the ordinary—when they were walking around campus, they saw “digital composers,” writing on “electronic scratchpads” (to borrow the phrasing of one of my students, Connor M.)—when they turned on Netflix or flicked through Instagram or Snapchat, they moved from being unconscious authors to conscious scriptors. That makes me pretty happy. Looking forward to what my spring class will say!

UT: Anything else? 

Longhorns make a case for their word of 2016. 

UT English: Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re teaching next semester. 

Laura Wallace: I'm a postdoctoral lecturer in the English department. I finished my PhD here in Summer 2016. This spring, I'm teaching Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture. It'll be my fourth time teaching this course at UT. Our syllabus includes authors and characters who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, and/or all or none of the above. And it's a Writing Flag, so there are lots of different kinds of writing assignments.

UT: What will you be reading?

LW: We'll read some classic gay and lesbian texts, like Gertrude Stein's "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene," Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues and some more recent books, including Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (which is a graphic novel),  Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (which is a young adult novel set in El Paso!) and--new to the syllabus this semester!--a collection of short stories, Misadventure by Nicholas Grider.  

UT: What is your favorite of everything you’ll be reading next semester?

LW: While I love pretty much everything on this syllabus, I am especially partial to the novel Nevada by Imogen Binnie, which is usually the last book we read in the course, and the anonymous pamphlet "Queers Read This." I love the narrative voice in Nevada and I love the rage in "Queers Read This"--which, unfortunately, is as relevant 25 years later as it was in the early 1990s.

I am also really attached to the movie I'll be showing, which is called Appropriate Behavior. It follows the misadventures of a 20-something bisexual Iranian American woman in Brooklyn. Not only is the protagonist (played by writer-director Desiree Akhavan) hysterically funny and awkward, but she's one of the only main characters in a feature film who I've ever heard self-identify as bisexual.

UT: What will final projects look like?

LW: One of my main goals for the entire course is to encourage students to claim ownership of their ideas and their interpretations, and the final projects are where they really get to put this into practice. Among the options are: a traditional comparative essay, a polemic or manifesto, fanfiction, or a poetry collection. A few of my favorite examples from this year: one student wrote a beautiful song inspired by Aristotle and Dante; another made a really funny video inspired by a scene in Nevada where the main character narrates her morning routine; and a third student wrote a piece of fanfiction from the perspective of one of the more homophobic characters in Stone Butch Blues that demonstrated intense empathy for a really unlikable character.

UT: What’s one of the most important things you want your students to take away from this class? Or, what do you hope they’ll get out of it?

LW: In all of the classes I teach, I ask students to begin with their own responses: why do certain texts make us feel certain ways? Why do we like some texts and reject others? Examining our own aesthetic and emotional responses in a collaborative setting leads us all to ask how we know what we know, how the literature and media we encounter shapes our understanding of the world, and how our own words and creations might affect others.

What does poetry look like in color?  UT English alum Reed Erlandson wrote a Python script that provides some new readings. See Emily Dickinson’s “complex palette of flowers,” or Maya Angelou’s “flexile swatch of black and sapid browns.” (Emily Dickinson, above).