A student in my Victorian Literature class complains (the third time in five weeks) that we’re reading too much and too fast for this subject. I do worry, as I know that he is bright and capable –also that, like too many of our students, he works, given the serious scarcity of grants in our […]
I was teaching Wuthering Heights, trying to convince my students that when Heathcliff characterises his wife Isabella as a very dumb creature who has stupidly mistaken him for a gentleman hero of romance, Emily Brontë is actually pulling the rug under our feet –‘we’ being the women readers who, like Isabella, are mesmerised by the […]
This post is not so much about teaching as about writing academic essays. I’m working on a paper on the concept of sexiness as regards men under the female heterosexual gaze and for the umpteenth time I’ll have to quote Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” (In The Sexual Subject: A […]
A post today on the uses of virtual environments to help teach Literature. From the title you can see that this week I have been learning to use Moodle, maybe much later than you, my reader (if you exist), as it seems dear UAB has not been exactly in a hurry to open its Moodle […]
I wish this were a romantic post about counting the hours until seeing a loved one. It is not romantic at all, as here I want to comment on how our working time is being quantified to ridiculous extremes. In Spain tenured university teachers are civil servants. The contract we sign with the Spanish state […]
Yes, more about Wuthering Heights. I’ve been reading with my students today, among others, the scene when Nelly Dean tries to persuade an upset, teenage Heathcliff that he has nothing to envy his rival in love, blond, blue-eyed Edgar Linton. “Come to the glass,” she says, “and I’ll let you see what you should wish”: […]
Yes, I made a mistake with the last slide of my PowerPoint presentation introducing Wuthering Heights. I inserted an image of the edition of Emily Brontë’s masterpiece publicised as ‘Bella and Edwards’s favourite book.’ What? You don’t know who Bella and Edward are? Been hiding with Bin Laden in the last few years?? Perhaps even […]
This post was lost during the updating of the UAB’s blog software, somebody may have read a longer version. Here I go again… This week I’m done assessing MA dissertations for three different MA degrees and now’s the time to consider what the new European convergence plans for higher education, which we know as plain […]
This week I have started teaching ‘Victorian Literature,’ a second-year subject within the new ‘Estudis Anglesos’ degree. Fun started when I mentioned ‘the three famous Brontë sisters.’ You should have seen my students’ blank faces!! Those who did know what I was talking about explained to me that the sisters were… Emily, Charlotte and the […]
19 September 2010, beginning of the academic year, which is like New Year for us, teachers. A good moment to start a new blog. I believe blogs should focus on a single theme, so here’s mine: the joys of teaching literature. Those who know me will quickly realise this is both an ironic and a […]