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 […]
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 […]
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 8th March, International Women’s Day, a group of women at my Facultat, led I believe by Prof. Teresa Camps, decided to decorate a very visible wall in one of the main corridors with four photos (about 50 x 50 cms) of the same series. The black and white photos show a young white woman, […]
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 […]
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 […]