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 […]
As part of my MA course on ‘Postmodernities: New Sexualities/New Textualities,’ which deals with Gender Studies as it is easy to surmise, I decided to include a ‘chick lit’ novel. I needed something reasonably short and, ideally, about a woman who already has a candidate to be her Mr Right but who comes across the […]
I was trying to get my students interested in Oscar Wilde’s peculiar position as a late Victorian celebrity avant la lettre, and before I really knew what I was saying I blurted out that his celebrity status then was not so different from that of Venezuelan import Boris Izaguirre today. That surely got their attention […]
It’s taken me a few months to go through the 2,000 pages that compose Robinson’s trilogy about the (hopefully) soon to come colonisation of Mars: Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1992) and Blue Mars (1996). At some point, particularly when the end of the Mars 500 experiment was announced (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_500), I thought that Mars […]
I have a new book out. It’s very small, only 84 pages, but it’s taken plenty of reading and plenty of thinking, so I thought I’d use this blog to publicise it a little bit. The volume is called Desafíos a la Heterosexualidad Obligatoria and it’s part of the enticing collection that Meri Torras is […]
I’m beginning to sound like a broken record but I guess this is yet another sign of my incipient depression. A few days after the Spanish elections the Catalan government insidiously announced yet another paycut for civil servants, something between 1 and 3% to be deducted off the extra month’s salary paid in June and […]
At the last count, the male students following actively my Victorian Literature subject are 9 in a class of 50 active students (by this I mean that about 10 more are registered but never show up). This is about 20%, slightly higher than in other courses I have taught, in which the proportion was usually […]