Love Letter Workshop Led by EGADS! Member, Feb. 12

From Dr. Dominguez:

This upcoming Friday, February 12 – just before Valentine's Day, the Brownsville Historical Association will be hosting a special workshop entitled "For the Love of Letters."  The workshop will be conducted by our own English graduate assistant Jenny Ashley.  At the workshop, you'll get a short history of the love letter, especially the art of letter-writing during the Victorian period, and then have some hands-on time to craft your own love letter.

Here is the information about the workshop as advertised by the Brownsville Historical Association.  I hope you will make the effort to go; it will be great support for Jenny, and the workshop really sounds like it will be fun.

The Brownsville Historical Association cordially invites you to spend a romantic evening with them. On Friday, February 12, at 6 pm, the BHA will host a love letter writing workshop just in time for Valentine’s Day. The cost is $3 for non-members and free for members. During the Victorian era, letters were used to express every type of emotion, but most especially and perhaps most importantly, love. Although letter writing may not be as common today as it was in the past, it can still bring happiness to both the sender and receiver. Join Jenny Ashley, graduate assistant at UTB-TSC, as she leads a workshop designed to tell the history of the love letter using real life love stories. Also, get a chance to let your feelings out by writing your own love letter to someone special in your life. Enjoy strawberries and champagne, along with a 15% discount on the book, For the Love of Letters by Samara O’Shea.

 

Directions:

Brownsville Heritage Complex 1325 E. Washington St. Brownsville, TX 78520

 

The Brownsville Heritage Complex is attached to the Stillman House Museum, also 1324 E. Washington St. in downtown Brownsville.  There is a small parking lot in the Heritage Complex – street parking is available, and after 5 pm, there should be spots available on the street.

UTPA Summer Writing Program

I did this writing program last summer. It was fabulous! The only hitch is that you have to apply to their MFA program, with all the paperwork that involves. But if you want a Mexico vacation and you want to write, I recommend it.

Journal of South Texas English Studies Call for Papers

Bridges and Borders: Exploring the Confluence of Languages, Disciplines, and Cultures

The Journal of South Texas English Studies is now welcoming submissions until March 5 for its second issue, themed “Bridges and Borders: Exploring the Confluence of Languages, Disciplines, and Cultures.”

Bridges are frequently built up and torn down, and borders often change. The boundaries between people, places and things blur and break. This happens with governments, but it is equally true in literature and rhetoric. Authors frequently challenge our notions of what is acceptable, they point out our close-mindedness, and they show us new paths.

The biannual journal, which is a collaboration between University of Texas at Brownsville graduate English students and the UTB English Department, also accepts a small number of poetry and creative prose submissions. Papers not connected to the theme will be considered, but those that follow the theme have the best chance to be published.

Scholarly papers can include topics in literature written in English, rhetoric and composition, and literary theory. These should not exceed 8,000 words and should be formatted according to the latest MLA style guide. There is no limit to the number of poems that may be submitted, but the total number of lines cannot exceed 100. We accept short fiction up to 1,500 words, flash fiction up to 800 words, and creative non-fiction up to 2,000 words.

Deadline for submissions is March 5. If you have any other questions or wish to make a submission (as a Microsoft Word attachment), please e-mail Editor Andrew Keese at SouthTexasEnglishStudies@gmail.com. For more information and for submission guidelines, please visit the journal’s website at www.southtexasenglish.blogspot.com.

UTSA Graduate English Symposium Call for Proposals

2010 UTSA English Graduate Symposium

The 2010 UTSA English Graduate Student Symposium "Wild Tongues: Concepts of the Untamed in Scholarship, Teaching, Writing, and Beyond.”

Sponsored by the Department of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio

May 1, 2010 at The University of Texas San Antonio in San Antonio, TX

Keynote Speaker: Norma Alarcón

Proposal Submission Deadline: March 15, 2010

How do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down?
- Gloria Anzaldúa

What does it mean to be wild? Certainly “wild” is often a term associated with the unnatural, the uncultivated, or the abnormal. Throughout history, the wildest ideas have been the first to be subverted and repressed by dominant forces. Must our wild tongues be tamed, or cut out, as Gloria Anzaldúa posits in her essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”? Those who initially enact social, political, and educational change are often deemed as wild, unrestrained, undisciplined, and even dangerous. Yet, without transformation there is little growth in both the personal and political spheres. Change makes way for the new and breaks the idea of established practice and challenges our ideas of what is true. Wildness is in many ways the seed of evolution, and revolution, in our systems of belief, practice and creation. Anzaldúa alludes to this change and encourages that acts of incivility both complicate and reinvent our navigations of private, social, and political space.

This symposium seeks to explore concepts of the untamed within the practices of scholarship, teaching, writing, and any area that confronts or interrogates the impact of change and transformation on our lives. This interdisciplinary symposium will bring together graduate students, scholars, writers, and performers from throughout the central and border regions of Texas.

We invite papers that engage the concept of wild tongues in all of their forms. Papers may challenge, complicate, critique, or expand current conceptualizations of the untamed in all disciplines, including, but not limited to, literary, cultural, queer, feminist, environmental, American, political, subaltern, bicultural, and popular cultural studies.

We also encourage topics that propose new and imaginative approaches to discourse analysis, methodology, and pedagogy. Visual arts proposals are highly encouraged; the symposium will feature an exhibition of artistic responses such as paintings, drawings, and sculptures related to our theme. We also invite creative writing proposals that bridge disciplines and explore questions of revolution and imagination.
Some possible topics include:

- Language
- Desire
- Concepts of communities/nations/space
- Alternative literacies
- Pedagogies in the grade school, university, or feminist classroom
- Discourses of development, progress, and difference
- Feminist methodologies
- Discourses of nativism, hybridity, and mestizaje
- Rhetorics of nationhood, sovereignty, and terrorism
- Local and global policies
- Environmental studies
- Queer studies
- Popular Culture
- Science Fiction
- Film Studies
- Music Studies
- Imagination in the arts
- Poetry as a revolutionary art form
- Politics and poetry
- Body studies
- Technologies of imagination
- Socio-linguistic studies

Please submit 250-word individual abstracts or panel proposals (comprised of a 250-word abstract for the panel as a whole and titles for each paper) to utsagradconf@gmail.com by March 15, 2009. Paste your proposal into the body of the email message and include any technology requests. If submitting a work of art, please attach a low-resolution image of your piece, if possible, in addition to your abstract. The conference registration fee is $20.00 for pre-symposium registration and $25.00 for registration at the symposium.

Submit: utsagradconf@gmail.com
Email Subject: Abstract for Wild Tongues
Deadline: March 15, 2010

UTB/TSC Research Symposium in March

The EGADS! Conference is in three weeks on Feb. 20, but another opportunity is coming up to present: The UTB/TSC Research Symposium. Present a paper at each, and you have two lines for your CV without ever having to travel!

12th Annual UTB/TSC Research Symposium

Open to UTB/TSC students, faculty and staff to present and view.

Friday, March 26, 2010, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Keynote Speaker: Luis Martínez, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, The Scripps Research Institute-Florida

Deadline for Submissions: March 1, 2010

For more information, visit blue.utb.edu/research/2010_symposium.html.

Another Salinger Article

This New York Times article about Salinger is excellent.

J. D. Salinger, author of 'Catcher in the Rye,' dies

Maybe now we'll find out what Salinger has been writing all these years. Check out this story from The Washington Post:

J. D. Salinger, 91, a celebrated author and enigmatic recluse whose 1951 novel "The Catcher in the Rye" became an enduring anthem of adolescent angst and youthful rebellion and a classic of 20th-century American literature, has died at his home in Cornish, N.H.

The author's son, in a statement from the author's literary representative, confirmed the death to the Associated Press. Mr. Salinger died Wednesday, according to the AP, but no cause of death was immediately reported.

To read more, click here.

Don't Blame Yourself if You Can't Understand Theorists

I just had to share this. Ever wonder why we can't understand some theorists? Dieter Freundlieb in Poetics Today (16.2) notes that "poststructuralists such as Foucault and Derrida often seem to use scholarly language and argumentation for purely strategic purposes rather than for participation in a communal and democratic effort to reach consensus. Occasionally, this is even openly admitted, as when Derrida, commenting on his allegedly often misunderstood phrase that there is nothing outside the text (and similar statements), said it served a strategic function." Now I know why I am unable to read through an entire Derrida essay in one sitting.

Proof: Plain English is Best

In 2005, Science Daily reported on a study by psychologist David M. Oppenheimer that using big words without need makes people think you're dumb. 

Great Comic on Misspelling

"Ten Words You Need to Stop Misspelling" by The Oatmeal.