These days the Armenian genocide is back on the news thanks to the law passed by the French Senate criminalising its denial (see, for instance, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16677986). This law, proposed by Sarkozy’s party and sanctioned by him as President, is quite similar to the corresponding German law that makes it a criminal offence to deny the […]
One of my second-year students emails me a paper with a suspiciously wide-ranging vocabulary. I smell the usual rat, google the suspect sentences like mad but find no convincing evidence of plagiarism. My gut feeling, however, tells me that something has gone awry and, rightly or wrongly, I award the paper the lowest possible mark, […]
Last Sunday I watched on TV3 a French documentary on Korean secondary-school kids, “South Korea, Slave to Education.” The film explains that Korean students are doing marvellously according to the PISA yearly report and also that they hold a top world record in that 8 out of 10 attend university. The thesis, however, as you […]
I have just finished marking a batch of 48 papers (1,200 words on average each), a task which has taken much of my time this week, the weekend included. I wish actually I could say I’m done, for the downside of all that time and effort is that the poorest 23 of these papers will […]
I came across David Brin’s Glory Season (1993) while looking for a suitable topic for an oncoming conference on Utopian Studies in Tarragona (see http://wwwa.urv.cat/deaa/utopia/international/home.html). This, a low-tech SF novel about a utopian “feminist nirvana” written by a man, sounded promising enough, backed as it was by its Hugo and Locus nominations (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_Season). I […]
In this and the following entry I’d like to write about two very different books I’ve been reading for academic purposes, in one case connected with teaching and in the other with the search for a topic linked to a conference. You’ll see why. I chose Rafael Yglesias’s novel A Happy Marriage (2009) for my […]
This semester we’re awarding our Victorian Literature students extra points for attending a performance of either Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece La importància de ser Frank (see related posting in October), or Egos Teatre’s production of Els crims de Lord Arthur Saville, a musical based on Wilde’s short story. Ironically, Wilde’s classy and classic comedy was offered […]