The experiment I am running in the fourth-year core subject Contemporary Fiction in English is progressing well, but there are some snags that I’d like to address here. Here we go, then. We have now finished Unit 1 (1990-1997) and have started Unit 2 (1998-2006) and even though most students have finished reading the […]
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 […]
I have finally started teaching my new subject Contemporary Literature in English after months of preparation and this is my first post directly connected to the issues raised in class. The subject, as I explained to the students, has two main purposes: familiarizing them with the most relevant fiction and non-fiction published between 1990 and […]
I was going to write about my increasingly worrying addiction to GoodReads. In the end, though, this has become a post about the deprofessionalization of book reviewing, based on a consideration of the very diverse influence of reviewers Michiko Kakutani and Emily May, the former a stalwart of The New York Times and the latter […]
When we started working on the new 2021 syllabus, my Literature colleagues and I came to the conclusion that our students have too little contact with the contemporary world. Our undergrads take in the first year an Introduction to English Literature, which basically covers the British and Irish 20th century, beginning with James Joyce’s “The […]