One of my doctoral students, Rafael Miranda, has just passed his viva (or ‘defensa’) after submitting a brilliant doctoral dissertation on cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk. I am personally VERY proud to have helped him make such an interesting contribution to the field of Science-Fiction Studies. Particularly because that field is so tiny in Spanish English Studies […]
If you care to read my entry for 16 February, you will see I’m trapped in a kind of sinister loop. Then I complained bitterly about the appalling conditions of classroom 302 in our Facultat, a room which is beginning to remind me of Stephen King’s 1408 and other mythical Gothic rooms. After being called […]
You might be familiar with the French film Sarah’s Key (Gilles Paquet-Brenner, 2010), originally titled Elle s’appelait Sarah, like the best-selling novel (2007) by Tatiana de Rosnay which it adapts. I saw the film, loving, as usual, Kristin Scott-Thomas’s fine performance. She plays Julia, a journalist who doggedly follows the clues leading her to discover […]
I’m reading Teresa De Lauretis already ancient collection Technologies of Gender (1987!) and I stumble onto her post-Mulvey cry for a truly feminist cinema. By this she means, as it is well-known, not just a cinema by, about and for women, dealing with issues concerning women, but a cinema using specifically female narrative and aesthetic […]
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 […]