UT Arlington English Graduate Students News

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Graduate Studies Events

Winter & Spring Registration for Continuing Graduate Students begins October 25;
for New UTA Students it's November 8
Fall Graduation Deadline is September 27, 2010
Request Master's Thesis/Dissertation Defense by November 15, 2010
Hold Master's Exam/Dissertation Defense by November 24, 2010
Submit copy of Thesis/Dissertation to Grad School by November 24, 2010
Submit Approved Thesis/Dissertation to Grad School by December 6, 2010
Submit Report of Master's Exam/Dissertation Defense by December 6, 2010

Did you know there are workshops just for graduate students? The UT Arlington Graduate School hosts several workshops: Transition From Undergraduate to Graduate Student; Transition from Employee to Graduate Student; Poster & Oral Presentation Skills; Thesis and Dissertation Prep, Formatting; Word for Dissertations & Theses; Writing in Graduate School: Introduction; Writing With Cohesion and Clarity; Writing Literature Reviews; Copyright & Theses/Dissertations; and much more. These workshops are offered this Fall. For more information, click on http://grad.uta.edu/students/services/workshops/

The Office of Graduate Studies announces a new program: I Engage Mentoring. Doctoral students can receive a $400 stipend when they serve as a research mentor to a UT Arlington undergraduate. For more information, go to the Mav Grad Blog, http://blog.uta.edu/ogsstudentservices/

Hermanns Lecture Series
Hermanns

Words From the Advisor

From the FAQ file of our local "wise guy" Graduate Advisor: "I finished my coursework; when is the Comprehensive Exam?"
"Comps" are custom-made and individually scheduled. You work with a three-member faculty committee, whose Chair coordinates the work. You are examined in three customized areas, and you assemble personalized lists of important readings in those areas, in concert with your committee. Each list includes 50-80 items, for a total of 150-240 items.
For more information, rely on our Graduate Advisor, Dr. Tim Morris

UTA News

UTA's OneBook is Dana Canedy's A Journal for Jordan. OneBook events will be scheduled throughout the 2010-2011 academic year.

UT Arlington holds the 151 position on the Sierra magazine's "Coolest Schools" list. Click on the link for more details: http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201009/coolschools/allrankings.aspx

UT Arlington "has been named to the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll" to recognize its "commitment to volunteering, service-learning and civic engagement."

UTA NEWS – from MavWire, Thursday, August 5, 2010 The University of Texas at Arlington was named one of the best colleges in the West, according to The Princeton Review, a nationally known educational services company. UT Arlington is one of 120 institutions The Princeton Review recommends in its "Best in the West" section of its website feature, "2011 Best Colleges: Region by Region," which was posted Monday on PrincetonReview.com. The review listed biology, general business, management, and nursing as popular degrees at UT Arlington. The colleges chosen for the "Best in the West" list are located in 15 states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Collectively, the 623 colleges named among the four regional best areas constitute about 25 percent of the nation's 2,500 four-year colleges. For this project, The Princeton Review asks students attending the schools to rate their own schools on several issues—from the accessibility of their professors to quality of the campus food—and answer questions about themselves, their fellow students, and their campus life.

UTA enrollment at 32,956 -- "up 17 percent from last year and almost 8,000 more than fall 2008." (Star-Telegram, September 17, 2010)

Texas Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award to Dr. Joanna Johnson, Senior Lecturer, in August, 2010. Awards Dinner in Austin and a $15,000 check for a job terrifically performed!

Dr. Kenneth Roemer's American Literature Anthologies project -- for details, read the 2010 College of Liberal Arts Report: http://www.uta.edu/libarts/exchange/articles/create/english_professor_takes.htm

Dr. Carolyn Guertin in the Digital Media news -- for details, read the 2010 College of Liberal Arts Report: http://www.uta.edu/libarts/exchange/articles/create/inevitable_change_spurs.htm

Grads Up!

Lorie Jacobs was recently elected President of the Graduate Student Senate.
Sherrin Frances successfully defended her MA Thesis on September 14, 2010.
Milissa Riggs accepted a full-time position with the IRS.
Stacy Thorne landed a full-time faculty position with TCCD.

Good Reads

More Than a War Story
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, by Karl Marlantes. Published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc. March 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV1tomEc24s&NA=1 Author interview with authormagazine.org
His novel is a finalist for the 2010 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize

When one has read One Very Hot Day, Tiger the Lurp Dog, A Bright Shining Lie, The Man From Saigon, and most of Tim O’Brien’s books, as well as several other titles, one more novel about the Vietnam War could go unnoticed, and, mostly, unread. But Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, deserves lots of readers, and not just readers whose primary interests are war literature. Matterhorn seems different from those other texts in a subtle, almost ineffable fashion.

Perhaps it is the landscape that pinpoints such a difference. The Vietnam in Matterhorn is one of jungle so dense that leeches fall from trees onto the squads and platoons crawling through the thick foliage. The characters are quickly camouflaged both literally and metaphorically as they snake their way through triple-canopied jungle. They can hide in the bush and remain unseen by enemy patrols; they flatten down and use semi-buried logs as effective barricades in firefights. Metaphorically, squads and platoons fade and transform into the dense greenery that, in itself, becomes a living, fully-dimensional character: The Jungle, The Bush, The Wilderness. Indeed, it is a wilderness of tigers, especially when a two-man LP (Listening Post) is attacked by a tiger, and one Marine is carried off. The squad searches for their friend, and finds him a day later, partially eaten. It's not only the enemy and the wildlife that attack the Marines; at times the very plant life seems to resist the Americans' attempts to establish a base area. When it's time to create an LZ (Landing Zone), the young Marines stare with exasperated anger at the bamboo that remains indifferent to the hacking of their K-Bars; finally, one Marine hurtles himself at the plant barricade and begins to flatten the ultra-stiff shoots. Soon the entire platoon engages in a macabre tackling exercise that leaves them sweating, exhausted, and bleeding from various cuts. But the LZ is established although its perimeter is barely large enough for the helicopters to land and take off.

Then, again, maybe the difference is the narratives and descriptions of the Marines fighting in the mountain ranges of Vietnam, not on the plains, around villages, or towns. The men establish a miserable, muddy, and bare camp on top of the mountain called Matterhorn, the top of which has been leveled and scraped raw by previous Marine platoons. The mountain climate is almost perpetually foggy; it's always humid, and the cloud ceiling is so low that choppers loaded with ammunition, medical supplies, C-rations, and water cannot fly safely to the mountain top, regardless of pleas from the commanding officers and assistant officers on the ground. Lt. Waino Mellas states, half-joking, half-frustrated: "We're going to die of dehydration in a monsoon" as his platoon tries to gather moisture from the eternal fog and afternoon rains on their ponchos, clothing, and scraps of material. Later, the platoons are ordered to abandon Matterhorn in order to assist in an offensive deemed "strategic" by generals, majors, and colonels. Once that operation is completed, however, the Marines are ordered to return to the same mountain area, establish a new camp, complete with an LZ, and dig in. They are transformed from a mobile fighting force to outnumbered human bait for the enemy regiment flowing towards Matterhorn and the safety of the border.

Another difference seems to be the characters. There are the war archetypes, of course: the sympathetic / empathetic General Mulvaney, wanting his Marines to endure and emerge victorious, but wretchedly realizing the physical, mental, and emotional tolls that will be exacted as he flashes to his own experiences during the Korean War at the Chosin Reservoir. There are the dunderheaded Major Stephens and Colonel Simpson, focused only on body counts, personal prestige, and moving troops on a map like Monopoly pieces. But the Marines of Bravo Company are, fittingly, the novel's heart. They aren't simply grunts, leathernecks, or faceless soldiers. They are Lt. Mellas, who shed his civilian dreams of glory when he began losing young men to mountain malaria, dehydration, and personally experiencing the helplessness of fighting without replenishment of basic supplies like water, food, and ammunition; they are the young Marines like Jackson, Cortell, and China, African-American Marines torn between their anger at the "real world" white society cruelties and inequalities and their sympathies with other squad members. Jackson refuses a promotion not because he dislikes Lt. Mellas, but because he knows the other African-American Marines will believe he has "sold out" to the "white man's system." Cortell tells a buddy that to "choose to believe in somethin' " is an act of will that he performs each morning when he wakes up and finds himself still alive. China's faith that violence against the white man's rule is the only way to equality is overturned when he must choose between betraying his contacts or saving his white gunnery sergeant from "fragging," or death by a grenade. There are other characters, as well, one of whom is a nurse, stationed on a Naval hospital ship, who tells a wounded Mellas that the medical staff can't allow themselves to see soldiers as anything but pieces of machinery that must be "fixed" so that they can be returned to the War Machine; to do otherwise would be emotionally destructive.

Matterhorn is about more than the Vietnam War; in this case, Tim O'Brien wrote it best in his "How to Tell a True War Story" closing:

In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river
and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do.
It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow.
It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

Film Shots

The Ghost Writer -- Film Review
by Deborah Glast, PhD GTA with the UT Arlington English Department

Regardless of your feelings about the scandalous history surrounding director Roman Polanski, his latest film The Ghost Writer, starring Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan, tells an intriguing tale of political intrigue, murder, and an on-going need for rewrites. Based on the novel by Robert Harris, who also co-wrote the screenplay alongside Polanski, the film chronicles McGregor, ironically only known as The Ghost, as he "ghosts" for Brosnan's Adam Lang, a wealthy former British prime minister embroiled in a very public political scandal. Yet McGregor is sadly not the first "ghost" for Lang, and he may not be the last. Without giving away too much of the plot, the intrigue pulls the audience into the drama and keeps us guessing until the very end.

Although the film is a bit long, you do have to endure until the very end to really understand the effective narrative strategies Polanski uses in telling the story and the intricate choices the director makes when it comes to what to show and how to show it. The final scene is the perfect example for teachers examining visual argument in that it epitomizes the concept of inclusion versus exclusion, what is included in the frame and what is not. Although the story itself is fascinating, it is the stunning architecture, backgrounds, and cinematography that move the film into the status of a truly well-made movie. Polanski incorporates Brosnan's beachfront home to exhibit impeccable modern architectural style compounded by the ever-overcast and hostile natural environment outside; the contrast shows the audience the chaos that lies under the pristine surface. In fact, many of the scenes are reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's style in that they rely heavily on the building up of tension and anxiety in the audience. A great example is when McGregor drives down a desolate road, in the previous ghost's BMW, with the deep tones of the grey sky above and the black paved road below. The space featured in the frame confines The Ghost by boxing him into the limited visual field as the camera zooms in for a closeup. Soft but eerie music whispers in the background to allow the maximum amount of tension to build before cutting to the next scene. Even though the political intrigue of the plot is interesting, the film's effectiveness is in its visual storytelling techniques. Were it not for the Hitchcock-like tension builders, visual imagery, and storytelling strategies, the film would not have succeeded in creating the lengthy but well-molded mystery that it is.

Professional Development

"We're writing more often than people did twenty years ago because e-mail and text messaging have taken the place of phone calls, and blogging is a popular pastime. We're all "professional" writers these days because our coworkers, friends, and family judge us on our writing . . . Although writing badly is like dressing in lime skorts and an orange plaid sweater -- people notice -- publicly correcting a stranger's writing is as rude as asking someone with a fashion problem "Did you think that looked good when you got dressed this morning?" " For a "quick and dirty" look at "some of the most common mistakes people make while communicating," check out the Grammar Girl's website: www.quickanddirtytips.com