I have been delaying this post in the hopes that some of our local Spanish universities would have bought by now the monograph I published back in November 2019, Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy: From Hitler to Voldemort (Routledge, https://www.routledge.com/Masculinity-and-Patriarchal-Villainy-in-the-British-Novel-From-Hitler/Martin/p/book/9780367441463). This has not happened yet, though you can check here where the volume is available near […]
A malfunction of my website forced to retrieve the folder where I keep the .pdf of the interview with Terry Eagleton which I did for the literary magazine Quimera, back in 2003. To my delight, the whole transcript of the original English version was still there (we published just a selection, in Spanish). After a […]
This post is inspired by two presentations offered yesterday during the sixth TELLC (Teaching English Language, Literature, and Culture) Department workshop, a series of meetings which I have been organizing since 2014 (see the Sharing Teaching Experiences notebooks at http://ddd.uab.cat/record/132688). My colleagues Felicity Hand and Andrew Monnickendam dealt with the issue of how we are […]
Sharing coffee with a friend who also loves science fiction, we end up wondering when the idea of the future died. The media have entered a phase which I can only call ‘punk’ (after the Sex Pistols’ 1977 hit song ‘No Future’), for its intense focus on the oncoming climate-change related apocalypse. Perhaps not oncoming […]
I have been asked to be on the board that will assess an MA dissertation dealing with V.V. Ganeshananthan’s first (and, so far, only) novel, Love Marriage (2008). This work created some stir in the year when it was published, earning the honour of making it to the long list of the Orange Prize, among […]
I have spent a good portion of my morning today working on a talk I’m giving next month at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. The topic is Cultural Studies, specifically my point of view on their evolution in Spain. As happens, I was invited ten years ago to lecture on this very same topic […]
Obsessing about how each of the great six male Romantic poets made a living is not the most orthodox way to approach them. It is now John Keats’s turn and, once more, this is, I think, a very relevant issue. I’ll begin, then, by mentioning Keats’s guardian Richard Abbey, the man who put in charge […]
I’m in the middle of reading Jon Savage’s Teenager (2007), a study of how youth was socially constructed between 1875 and 1945 in the USA, the UK, and some other European countries. We usually assume that ‘teenager’ appeared in Western culture in the 1950s but the first thing Savage’s volume teaches is that this word […]
I have just gone through the second season of the acclaimed series Netflix Stranger Things (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4574334/) and I’m currently reading Ernest Cline’s SF novel Ready Player One (2011, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One), the object of a recent film adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg and scripted by Cline himself. This is the second time I try to read Cline’s […]
In one of those bouts of curiosity that may overpower even the most cautious reader, I have gone through the twelve James Bond novels by Ian Fleming (there are two more books, with short fiction, and other novels by living authors). I am by no means a Bond fan but, like many others who don’t […]