I based my last lecture for my elective subject on audiovisual adaptations and production design on Sarah Cardwell’s volume Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester UP, 2002). In what must have been originally her PhD dissertation, Cardwell vindicates the specific aesthetics of television and focuses on four case studies: Brideshead Revisited (1981), Pride […]
I’m reading bibliography for my book on sons’ memoirs about fathers, which is now beginning to pass its first preliminary stage, though I still have no title, contract, or a delivery date. My current target is checking whether my intuitions can be transformed into a solid working hypothesis and a sound thesis. I believe that […]
Normally, I write the posts in English (for I must practice the language, particularly in an informal register, being a non-native speaker) and I translate them into Spanish, with the help of Word’s automatic translator, which is simply wonderful. Today, however, I’m doing this the other way round because the post is inspired by a […]
If I write here about the books I’m preparing, I eventually shame myself into writing them, so here we go. I had been reading for a while for a book on secondary characters in the European novel when it struck me that the committee judging the research exercises (or ‘sexenios’) might consider it Comparative Literature […]
I’m three classes away from finishing (on 28 May) my third/fourth year BA elective subject ‘English Prose: 21st Century Autobiographies and Memoirs’ and I’ve been drafting my conclusions. I have decided to share them here, together with a couple of lists. Each class (80-90 minutes) has consisted of the following: a mini-lecture (35 minutes) […]
The new book I present today, Exploring Reproduction and Gender in Contemporary Feminist Speculative Fiction: Mothers Out of this World, is a collective volume that I have co-edited with Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen, of the University of Zaragoza. This is the end of a long collaboration, initiated by Jessica herself, which has lasted about two years, perhaps […]
So, here we are in what might be seen retrospectively by historians as the beginning of World War III. All wars are stupid, but this one has been started out of such rampant stupidity that it’s really hard to believe. Neither the governments that clashed in WWI, nor Hitler, who provoked World War II, were […]
I was going to start writing my projected book on secondary characters, but then I realized that since it is not exclusively focused on English-language literature but on a selection of European novels in different languages, I might have problems presenting it in my next research assessment exercise (the board might value negatively my straying […]
It’s not at all usual for me to abandon an article at the writing stage, but today I’m giving myself permission. I’m sharing this misadventure in case you’ve also fallen down a rabbit hole and can’t climb out. Forgive me in advance for the long tale, I’m sort of exorcising this unfinished article from my […]
I wrote a while ago a post titled “Students’ Ratings of Faculty: How It Works and Some Ideas to Improve It (sic),” criticizing how the survey to rate our task as teachers is organized. Since then I’ve been pestering the Dean of my school to do something about this matter. Other teachers must have been […]