I have written here at least twice about introductions. Back in 2011 (how time passes!!), I wrote a post about the introductions to British drama, which I was then teaching, and then in 2017 another post about Scottish literature. My point was similar and it is still similar today: no matter how brief the introduction, […]
[This is a really complicated semester, with lots to mark and edit, and pressing personal issues, which explains why I’m being so irregular in my supposedly weekly posting. Apologies!] Today I’m writing about writers and my parasitical syndrome. You may have heard of impostor syndrome (feeling you’re underqualified for a task you’re doing proficiently) and […]
[No, I’m not writing about Donald Trump’s victory. I don’t agree with any of the analyses I have read and there will be time enough to consider the catastrophes that his cabinet will cause in the USA and around the world. If we survive.] A couple of my students asked me how come I have […]
I have shared in class with my students the article by Gaby Hinsliff’s “I Fear Books Are Going the Way of Vinyl Records – A Rarefied Pursuit for Hobbyists” published in The Guardian a couple of months ago. This article begins as the typical piece on summer reading to take then a turn towards the […]
I’m writing today in the hopes of better developing an idea I didn’t have time to expand on in class yesterday. I have been thinking about the meaning of the ‘contemporary’, both in the sense of how we consume books and which layers (I will explain) compose the totality of books at our disposal. […]
It turns out I have published 30 reviews, all of them of academic books, and I have two more about to be issued, which amounts more or less to one per year on average in the 33 years I have been an academic. For me, the most memorable for me is, no doubt, my […]
One of my colleagues has just retired and among the many books of his extensive library that he has given away (for that’s what happens with the books we store in our offices) I have rescued John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? (Faber & Faber, 2005). I have very fond memories of reading Carey’s […]
I have just marked 70 paper proposals that my second-year Victorian Literature students have submitted and since the feedback I need to offer might be useful beyond my class, I’m offering it here as a sort of open tutorial. In our English Studies BA we start using secondary sources in the first year, but […]
I’ll begin today by citing the post “Types of Open Access Publishing and the Benefits of Each” by Denise Mager from the blog Researcher.Life (16 August 2022), where I have found information on, precisely, the different types of open access publishing. Ready? (I’m shortening a bit the text): Are you puzzled? Me too… Let’s […]
Last week I wrote about the sheer amount of bibliography we are using in academic work. I neglected, however, to mention that in textual analysis primary sources are occupying less and less space. In the presentation of my volume La verdad sin fin: Expediente X back in September, Iván Gómez praised me for having the […]