Today I’m shamelessly piggybacking, this time using The Atlantic’s wonderful selection of 65 outstanding US picture books for infant and toddler ‘readers’ to fill in this blog entry. The piece is not signed, but you can find for each book a comment by the person who chose it (authors, librarians and other experts). The […]
Happy new academic year! May it brings plenty of positive energy for teachers and students, and the thorough defeat of patriarchal darkness in all fronts and nations (yes, I’m thinking of those awful guys). I’ll begin my sixteenth year as a blogger (how time passes!!), with a reminder that the all the yearly volumes can […]
I haven’t started reading yet the bibliography for my subject on the memoir as a literary genre, to be taught next year, though I have already a substantial bibliography. G. Thomas Couser’s Memoir: An Introduction (Oxford UP, 2012) seems to be the right text to begin reading. I don’t think, in any case, that academic […]
2025 is turning out to be one of the worst years in my life as a reader, for two reasons. One is that I find it harder and harder to find novels that interest me, of any type. The other is that since Trump’s election, I’m spending at least two hours a day reading the […]
I was told yesterday that I must bear in mind that not all of our students agree with the left-wing political position I defend, as a feminist and a socialist, and that some actually support right-wing policies. This is hardly surprising if we take into account voting statistics and the growth of the extreme right […]
I have published this week not one but TWO books gathering works written by my students. As I have been narrating here, I started publishing students’ work back in 2013-14, when I edited two volumes on Harry Potter. I became then hooked on project-oriented teaching for BA and MA subjects, mostly electives, and these new […]
Happy 2025! May it brings the world the peace we so much need and is at least marginally better than we expect right now, three days before the second inauguration of President Trump (President Musk? President Trusk? President Mump?). First, a confession: I’m distracted this semester with other personal and professional matters and I’m finding […]
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, […]
The GoodReads Choice Awards for 2024 were published three days ago and this is, then, the right time to take a look and see what they say about the platform and its readers. The most obvious implicit statement is that this is a heavily biased platform, with a very high presence of US readers and […]
[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 […]