Colleges going deep in the heart of ‘Texas studies’

Gene Young hovered in the half-light of a flickering black-and-white depiction of small-town Texas.

On-screen, in the opening scene of The Last Picture Show, the wind whistled through a lonesome streetscape, empty of everything save dust and desolation. As a teenage boy peered through the splintered windshield of a rusty pick-up, an unmistakable voice wailed on the radio.

“I remember this song coming from my brother’s Philco radio. That’s Hank Williams – the real Hank Williams – singing Why don’t you love me like you used to? ,” said Young, as the camera panned to reveal a deserted main street seemingly set in the middle of nowhere. “It really captures that country up there. What never stops is the wind.”

The students in Young’s “Texas Crossroads” course gazed silently at the cinematic imagining of Texas as a place of thwarted dreams and forlorn horizons. The week before, they had viewed a completely different portrayal of the Lone Star State: a scene from the 1956 epic Giant, which paints Texas as the “mighty colossus of the southwest, a land of infinite variety and violent contrasts.”

‘Idea of Texas’

This semester, the Sam Houston State University class will also watch snippets of Urban Cowboy and Hollywood iterations of the Alamo, read iconic Texas writers like Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, see performances by Cajun musicians and cowboy singers, and take a field trip to the Texas Independence Day celebration.

The “idea of Texas”- in literature, culture, politics and even food – is the focus of courses in college campuses around the state.

In classrooms from Huntsville to Houston, Abilene to Austin, students are alternately studying, skewering and celebrating the enduring notion of the Lone Star State as a land of mythic proportions and mighty individualists.

Another Sam Houston class, “Texas History 398,” deconstructs the concept of “Texceptionalism.” A Rice University course, “Kickin’ It in Small Town Texas,” explores the cultural nuances of life “beyond the hedges.”

At Texas A&M, which offers 10 Texas-flavored courses covering everything from anthropology to art history, a freshman seminar is devoted to the intricacies of Texas barbecue.

The University of Texas-Austin’s course list includes “Writing Texas,” which dissects the “premise that Texas is both a place lived in reality and a cultural phenomenon,” and “Texas State of Mind,” an interdisciplinary examination of geography, journalism, music, high school football and death row.

McMurry University in Abilene recently introduced the “Texas Semester,” promoted as a chance to “study abroad – in Texas.” In the program, students immerse themselves in the study of the state’s vastness and diversity,” culminating with a three-week road trip. “Those who finish it will have earned their spurs – and their swagger,” the school’s website promises.

“The state and the business community have invested a lot of money into creating that myth, and we’ve bought into the message that Texans are romantic larger-than-life rugged individualists,” said Frank de la Teja, a Texas State University history professor who served as state historian from 2007 to 2009. “It’s almost impossible to run into any kind of depiction of Texas that is realistic as a result.”

That aggrandized image, propagated in everything from beer and truck commercials to movies and political campaigns, provides plenty of fodder for academic analysis, debate and discussion.

In Ty Cashion’s “Texas History” class, the Sam Houston professor delights in puncturing traditional history that views the only true Texans as, in the words of historian T.R. Fehrenbach, “men who wrested the land from the wilderness, the Indians, and the Mexicans” – a view Cashion says paints most of the population as “enemies of the state.”

Other courses examine the intersections of the state’s rich cultural traditions: the food, music and front porches. As students in Texas A&M’s “Texas Barbecue” class learn about the different woods used to smoke meat, they also uncover the history of different regions of the state, said Jeffrey Savell, the meat science professor who has taught the class for three years.

In Rice’s “Kickin’ It in Small Town Texas,” one of the school’s student-taught classes, Daniel Willis leads his class through a survey of towns where life revolves around kolaches, chicken-fried steak and the Sonic Drive-In.

In a recent session, Willis treated his students to barbecued brisket, potato salad and Dr Pepper, with a Shiner beer “Family Reunion” 6-pack propped on his desk as a visual aid.

In “Texas Crossroads,” Gene Young wants his students to burrow into the lore and the lure of Texas, to untangle the mystery of what it means to be Texan.

With his sandy hair, furrowed face and West Texas twang, Young is both the embodiment of the Texas trope and a refutation of facile stereotypes.

A folksy storyteller who laces his lectures with jokes, tall tales and lyrics from Lyle Lovett songs, Young tosses off encyclopedic tidbits of history, geography, literature, film studies and musical knowledge.

The breadth of the course appealed to Jon Schreiber, 22, a criminal justice major from Windthorst. So did the chance to explode some myths about his home state.

“People up north think we all ride horses everywhere. Well, I ride a motorcycle. The real Texas is an incredible melting pot, so much of the old, so much of the new,” said Schreiber. “It’s not like anywhere else.”