As anyone who enjoys reading Dickens knows, he had a very active interest in theatre to the point of staging amateur theatricals in his own home and taking part in them as an actor (that is how he met Ellen Ternan). His passion for drama is more than obvious in the dialogue of his novels, […]
Recently, I spoke with a doctoral student working for her PhD dissertation on Herman Melville’s more neglected texts. To my surprise, she complained that the field of American Studies in Spain is saturated with research on 20th century and contemporary texts with a strong racial and ethnic component. This is why, in her view, 19th […]
I’ve started teaching Great Expectations and, as our times will have it, I have used a PowerPoint presentation to accompany a brief introduction to the life and works of Mr. Charles Dickens. In the course of searching for pictures that might make this write out of the remote Victorian past more real for them, I […]
This issue of whether the internet and the related digital resources make literary research faster comes up in conversation with our new MA students and with a doctoral student, now finishing her dissertation. Actually, I seem to have pretty much forgotten what it was like to do research before the internet although I wrote my […]
A student in my Victorian Literature class complains (the third time in five weeks) that we’re reading too much and too fast for this subject. I do worry, as I know that he is bright and capable –also that, like too many of our students, he works, given the serious scarcity of grants in our […]
I was teaching Wuthering Heights, trying to convince my students that when Heathcliff characterises his wife Isabella as a very dumb creature who has stupidly mistaken him for a gentleman hero of romance, Emily Brontë is actually pulling the rug under our feet –‘we’ being the women readers who, like Isabella, are mesmerised by the […]
This post is not so much about teaching as about writing academic essays. I’m working on a paper on the concept of sexiness as regards men under the female heterosexual gaze and for the umpteenth time I’ll have to quote Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” (In The Sexual Subject: A […]
A post today on the uses of virtual environments to help teach Literature. From the title you can see that this week I have been learning to use Moodle, maybe much later than you, my reader (if you exist), as it seems dear UAB has not been exactly in a hurry to open its Moodle […]
I wish this were a romantic post about counting the hours until seeing a loved one. It is not romantic at all, as here I want to comment on how our working time is being quantified to ridiculous extremes. In Spain tenured university teachers are civil servants. The contract we sign with the Spanish state […]