TWENTY (GREAT!) BRITISH SONGS: A (NON-CANONICAL!) SELECTION

My colleagues in ‘20th century English Literature’ (first-year) and myself have decided to use one spare week that we programmed after the unit on British Poetry for songs. I opened a Forum for students to contribute songs that they found interesting because of the lyrics but since the messages are trickling rather than pouring down […]

THE 2013 GRANTA LIST: THE CRYSTAL BALL (AND WHAT TO DO WITH IT?)

Granta is a British literary magazine (and publisher) that earned much notoriety, and kudos, back in 1983 for publishing a list of 20 ‘young’ British novelists (under 40) assumed to become soon literary stars. Granta got many of the names right, and the first list remains still today a monument to literary clairvoyance: it boasted […]

GOODBYE, MAGGIE: CONSIDERING THE LEGACY OF MARGARET THATCHER

Not even on the day of her flamboyant funeral have the Spanish media managed to pronounce Margaret Thatcher’s surname correctly: it’s ‘zatcha’ (more or less), not ‘tacher’. I suppose that the visual similarities with the word ‘teacher’ to our boorish, monolingual Spanish eyes are responsible for the habitual mispronunciation but this is nonetheless annoying. It’s […]

ON OUR STUDENTS’ AVERAGE COMMAND OF ENGLISH (AND WHAT THE AUTHORITIES THINK THEY SHOULD KNOW)

As La Vanguardia, among other newspapers, published this week only one third of all new students in Catalan universities possess a sufficient command of English (that is to say, B2 or First Certificate; see www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20130406/54372064211/universitarios-acceden-sin-nivel-minimo-ingles.html). The local government’s Department of Economy and Knowledge (‘Coneixement’), which also runs Catalan universities, is planning to make First Certificate […]

ENJOYING IAIN (M.) BANKS TO THE LAST: A SAD ANNOUNCEMENT

I was planning to make something special of my posting number 200 but the unexpected has taken me over. Completely. Today I have sent an abstract for a paper on Iain M. Banks’s The Hydrogen Sonata (2012), a novel I have discussed here (see 1-XI-2012, LET’S SUBLIME: A POLITICAL READING FOR THE HYDROGEN SONATA). The […]