I’ve just gone through Conrad’s Heart of Darkness once more, this time to teach it almost simultaneously in my post-grad subject on “The Vietnam War” for our MA, and in my under-grad subject on Victorian Literature. In the first case, I’ve also focused, of course, on Coppola’s Apocalypse Now!, which seems to me a worse […]
A very dear Department colleague, Mia Victori, passed away early this week, on November 29, the victim of an unexpected, massive stroke. She was only 44, and died while enjoying with her children and her sister a long-wished for sabbatical in California. We are all devastated, groping in the dark for clues that allow us […]
Last week I wrote that even Dr. Lecter would find Mr. Hyde scary and since then I’ve been mulling over why cannibalism never comes up in connection with Stevenson’s masterpiece. Actually, we had a lively discussion in class about the worst crime we imagine Hyde committing, and because the contemporary readings of the text focus […]
To begin with, I’m aware than I’m probably misusing the word ‘class’ as in the Anglo-American world teachers give lectures and teach seminars, whereas we, here in Spain, do a mixture of both, and, so, we teach ‘classes.’ Somebody correct me if I’m doubly wrong, please. Anyway, here’s my ranting and raving for today. If […]
I’ve read once more The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as I’ll start teaching it again tomorrow –actually, the second time this semester as my UOC students have already gone through it– and I marvel at how powerful Stevenson’s writing is. I also puzzle about how to explain to the students that […]
Many people assume that because a handful of writers make a spectacular living off their best-selling books, any writer makes money. So far, if I count what I have invested in my writing and what I have gained, I am awfully, appallingly in the red. I have the experience of earning nothing whatsoever from a […]
I ask the students to read a passage in Great Expectations which ends with the sentence “I must obey.” One of them pretends to mishear me and asks in surprise “masturbate?” The whole class laughs at the fake Freudian slip and we start then a conversation on Pip’s (and Heathcliff’s) strange sexual lives. If they […]
Let me return to the idea of how statistic impossibility undermines our common ground from another angle. This came up time ago in conversation with a colleague at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ángel Mateos (another SF fan!!). We were wondering one day about how many readers any of our publications actually get and how […]
A bright girl student pours down onto a long, singular email message the many reasons why she’s disappointed with Dickens: she “cannot see the literature” in Great Expectations, she dislikes Dickens’s too obvious moralising, and, generally, she finds him unable to impress her with a deep vision of what being human is about. He ‘doesn’t […]
“What happened to essential books?,” Rick Gekoski wonders, recalling with candid nostalgia an ideal 1974 when everyone had read the 21 books in his list, at least everyone he knew at Oxford (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/oct/22/essential-books, thanks to Laura Gimeno for the link). What’s happened is statistics, for now there’s so much of everything and so many […]