I’m taking a break from my main task today: going through the 49 paper proposals that my second-year students have sent me (I’ve managed 37 so far… yupiii!!! And it’s only 16:00). This is the first time they write an abstract, which makes their difficulties to firmly state what they aim at doing quite understandable. […]
This might be an example of intertextuality in the making. Or in hindsight. Also an example of how academics cannot really relax. For, I don’t know what nuclear physicists do for relaxation, but I tend to watch films, and, well, they make me think, an activity that often leads to writing papers. Or blog entries. […]
Two days before the beginning of the conference I have co-organised I got very concerned that we were short on student volunteers and, so, I asked my second-year class for help. There are 60 students in class, all of whom knew very well how important the conference was for me, as I had repeatedly explained. […]
I used my right not to be on strike to protect a conference I have been co-organising for the last 18 months from the disaster that the university strike programmed for 16 and 17 brought in. I agree that the situation in the Catalan universities is terrible but I don’t believe that strikes are an […]
Last Friday 11 as I got off the train at UAB a strong smell of garbage hit my nose. As I walked towards the Department using a back lane, I could soon see that the whole area from the station to the Faculties was covered in litter: crushed cans, plastic bags, rests of snacks… Another […]
Yesterday I taught an MA seminar at UB about Amy Heckerling’s Clueless as a film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, which it is indeed even though Austen’s novel is not credited at all. Inevitably, as I happen to dislike Austen very much, we eventually came to the point in which I criticised Emma (and Clueless) […]
I’m co-organising a three-day conference for which we have received proposals to present 31 round tables, 4 workshops and 146 papers. Yes, very successful. I happen to be coordinating the programme and, well, it’s very complicated because with 90 minutes sessions we need 8 simultaneous classrooms, which also makes it highly unlikely that panel attendance […]
We have included again Oscar Wilde’s delicious comedy The Importance of Being Earnest in our Victorian Literature syllabus and, luckily for our students, this has coincided with the successful production offered at Teatre Gaudí by the stage company Lazzigags Productions. Ivan Campillo, responsible for the new Catalan translation, is, besides, the director and also the […]
I have spent whatever free time I’ve managed to hoard in the last ten days glued to the 1042 pages of Neal Stephenson’s last novel Reamde. The volume is not only very thick but also trade-paperback size, which means it is huge indeed. I’ve gone through Stephenson’s Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon (twice), The […]
Many critics have already suggested that the unfortunate Branwell Brontë provided the main inspiration for his sister Anne’s self-destructive Arthur Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. He seems to have been also Emily’s bleak muse for the degraded Hindley Earnshaw, Cathy’s brother. In both cases, Arthur’s and Hindley’s, they are contrasted with a stronger […]