John Stoltenberg calls himself a ‘radical feminist’ activist, though in my view he appears to be one of the few genuine anti-patriarchal male fighters. There are two reasons, however, why he prefers using ‘feminist’, as I deduce. One is that feminism made him aware of patriarchal injustice. As he writes in his main work, Refusing […]
[I’m still enjoying my three-week summer break, which is why I feel today particularly rusty. In academic terms, my holidays consists of a) not answering work-related email and b) not thinking of my extremely busy agenda from next week onwards. Beyond this and as all academics do, I’m reading all I can manage between outings. […]
An important function of film adaptations is calling the attention of potential readers to works they would have missed otherwise. I am one of the many readers who became familiarized with the world of the Aubrey-Maturin series by English writer Patrick O’Brian thanks to Peter Weir’s excellent film Master and Commander: The Far Side of […]
Allow me to take Manuel de Pedrolo (1918-1990) as the centre of the argumentation I want to develop here. Pedrolo is a key author of Catalan literature, to which he contributed about 100 works in all genres (poetry, drama, novel, journalism) and also his translations of first-rank international work by American and European novelists. He […]
[Please, note: This is the prologue I have written for the trilingual edition of Manuel de Pedrolo’s Mecanoscrit del segon origen (1974). The text explains why and how it has been produced.] When I joined the team in charge of organizing the Barcelona Eurocon, back in the autumn of 2015, little could I imagine that […]
I have read with great pleasure Xavier Aldana Reyes’s new volume, Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership (Routledge). I’m very proud to see how he is fast progressing into being a truly first-rank academic, as it is always delightful for a teacher to see how someone who used to sit in […]
This is a time-capsule post, of the kind that gets written with the author expecting to check in five-years time what really happened. Like many people all over the world–as shown by the instantaneous collapse of the stock market–I expected Britons to have voted in favour of staying in the European Union. This is a […]
It’s June and these days we’re also busy marking exams. We’re also busy wondering why we give our students exams and what use they are (the exams, not the students!). What use assessment is, in fact. I have just entered the final marks for the course I have taught this semester and they are exactly […]
I assumed that there would be already a handful of academic articles on Gillian Flynn’s 2012 best-selling novel Gone Girl, adapted for the screen by David Fincher in 2014 from a script by the author herself. Not at all. My university’s meta-searcher, Trobador, has returned 712 results, only 2 of which appear in the MLA […]
I published a post back on 26 April in which I quoted from an interview with American neurologist Alice Weaver Flaherty, author of the book The Midnight Disease (2004), an essay on neurology and literary creativity. I have read now her volume and although I do not wish to offer here a formal review I […]