[Last entry: 19 February – um, yes, it’s the beginning of the semester, a mad time until the subjects get themselves running and students find their places… Difficult to put aside 60 minutes for a blog entry… yet sanity calls!!] Last week I produced a chronology of the first four decades of the 20th century […]
Henrik Ibsen’s ‘heroine’ Hedda Gabler has taken residence up at Teatre Lliure for a while and is today leaving town. Good riddance! Students of Victorian Literature will recall Shaw’s claim in The Quintessence of Ibsenism that whereas late 19th century British plays generated nothing much except entertainment, Ibsen’s generated discussion. Well, here it is: I’m […]
I have started a new edition of our first year subject ‘20th century Literature’ and, as usual, I’m mystified by how untidy the labels used to describe it are. Not that Metaphysical or Romantic are particularly tidy, either, which sets me thinking about how and why such a mess has been made of organizing (English) […]
My colleague David Owen has often heard me predict that soon enough at least part of our academic work will be eventually self-published on our websites. This is why he emailed me a very juicy article by Dave Lee about “The authors who are going it alone online – and winning” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16469000). The article highlights […]
I am now part of a team of UAB and UB Literature teachers grouped together in an ‘MQD’ project (‘Millora de la Qualitat Docent’ = Teaching Quality Improvement). Our aim is improving our methodology by focusing on the narrator when teaching Literature. This is the reason why we decided to ask students to write their […]
I see someone carrying a bag with a Spanish brand name on it –Massimo Dutti?– followed by the word ‘since’ and a year number. I cringe, almost outwardly. A web in Spanish announces the new collection ‘Be my Valentine by Bershka’ and I double cringe (I heard someone described on Tele5 as a very intelligent […]
In my Department, since more and more staff are woefully underpaid provisional part-time associate teachers, there are fewer and fewer of us, tenured teachers, who can do the inevitable admin work. This is why I could not reject my appointment as Coordinator of our English Studies BA-style degree. For two years, possibly three, which would […]
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 […]