In the process of preparing two very small selections of Victorian poems and essays for our second year students, I’ve gone through a number of the main anthologies in the field. To tell you the truth, I’m quite amused by what I’ve found. And also disappointed. I’ll name a few volumes. For poetry: Victorian Women […]
Appalled? Amazed? Astonished? Dismayed? How does this piece of news make you feel?: Bompiani, Umberto Eco’s publishers, have just announced the publication on October 5 of a simplified version of his best-selling historical thriller The Name of the Rose (1980)… simplified by the author himself to make it more accessible to new readers. The article […]
Get Independence Day, Black Hawk Down, Cloverfield and a number of alien-slashing computer games and out of this heady cocktail comes Battle Los Angeles, one of the cheekiest pieces of US military propaganda you can ever imagine. The storyline, strikingly similar to that of Skyline, couldn’t be simpler: Los Angeles is invaded by an army […]
In his excellent cultural history of sf, simply called Science Fiction (2005) Roger Luckhurst comments at one point on C.P. Snow’s The New Men (1954). This is a novel in which a dying nuclear physicist envisions a sad, decadent future for post-WWII Britain. Two things can happen, according to this Englishman: “the best is that […]
David Gilmore is an American anthropologist who specialises in Spanish masculinism in recalcitrant local areas, which, I’m sure, is enough for several academic careers. Having puzzled over his volume Manhood in the Making (1991), which deals with the rites of passage devised by men around the world to access ‘proper’ masculinity, I embarked this summer […]
(It feels very nice to return to this blog after a much necessary three-week summer break, which, like all Literature teachers, I have spent chain-reading… Shouldn’t this count as work time??) Among my summer reading I have included Iain M. Banks’s last Culture novel Surface Detail (2010). He happens to be my favourite sf writer […]
Among the myriad things we, teachers, do in July one is (re-)reading the set texts for the coming academic year and, in some cases, seeing the corresponding film adaptation (on DVD, self-financed) to check whether it might be of use to complement the book (also self-financed). I personally enjoy very much doing research on film […]
I’m writing a chapter for a collective book, edited by José Francisco Fernández Sánchez, on how contemporary British writers have progressed since the publication of Blincoe & Thorne’s anthology (and manifesto) All Hail the New Puritans (2000). I chose (I begged…) to write about Alex Garland, as I’m very much interested in how he’s straddling […]
SHE is in town, the one who made all that possibly with the publication of that book back 20 years ago, invited once more to illuminate us (at great expense, with public money). I saw her years ago, one among a crowd of adoring admirers and I liked her very much because she deflated her […]
I believe that when theatre disappoints it does do with the same intensity as when it pleases: very much. This is not quite the same in the case of cinema, I’m not sure why; somehow, bad films are soon forgotten, whereas bad plays, always harder to follow than films, remain stuck in our memories. I’m […]