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Don Graham
University of Texas at Austin
Department of English
1 University Station, B5000
Austin, Texas 78712-1164
512.471.8387
dgbb@mail.utexas.edu
Don Graham is the J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of American and English Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author or editor of numerous books and articles, including Kings of Texas: The 150-Year Saga of an American Ranching Empire (2003), which won the Carr P. Collins Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters as best nonfiction book of the year, and Lone Star Literature: A Texas Anthology (2006). His latest book, Literary Austin, was published in 2007. He is a past president of the Texas Institute of Letters and a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly. He is currently writing a book on Texas movies for Texas Christian University Press.
Presentations
Texas Films: The Awful Truth
In a candid and humorous look at the history of Texas in the movies, Don Graham uses slides and commentary to trace the development and dissemination of images of Texas and Texans in film from 1911 to 1999. The first Texas film, titled Texas Tex, was shot in Denmark in 1908, and things have gone downhill from there. The awful truth is that Texas has usually been misrepresented in the movies, and that, at the present time, movies about Texas have never been worse. From the epic scope of Giant to the downsized cornball-ism of the last small movie about a small Texas town—this is where we are now.
The Movie Giant as the Archetypal Texas Film: A Study in Gender, Race, and History
By close examination of the diner scene from Giant, this presentation reveals the construction of significant themes of gender and race in the 1956 classic film about the clash between Texas ranching and oil cultures. Related texts drawn from poetry and fiction will be used to illuminate the film as well. Thus Giant is shown to offer a prescient, multicultural vision of Texas past and present.