I published a post back on 26 April in which I quoted from an interview with American neurologist Alice Weaver Flaherty, author of the book The Midnight Disease (2004), an essay on neurology and literary creativity. I have read now her volume and although I do not wish to offer here a formal review I […]
Patologías de la realidad virtual: Cibercultura y ciencia ficción (2015, Fondo de Cultura Económica) by Teresa López-Pellisa is a necessary book. As Naief Yehya writes in the Prologue, “Cada vez es más claro que en nuestro tiempo las relaciones sentimentales con los dispositivos tecnológicos materiales o immateriales han dejado de ser una extraña perversión para […]
My doctoral student Josie Swarbrick, who is working on the representation of monstrous masculinity in SF cinema, visited last week my SF class to offer a presentation based on one of her dissertation’s chapters, the one on District 9. In that film a massive alien starship reaches Johannesburg carrying thousands of refugees who have nowhere […]
This post is inspired by two sources: one, the article “The 2015–16 TV Season in One Really Depressing Chart” by Josef Adalian and Leslie Shapiro published online in Vulture (http://www.vulture.com/2016/03/2015-2016-tv-season-in-one-depressing-chart.html#); the other the collective non-academic volume Yo soy más de series (2015, http://www.esdrujula.es/libro/yo-soy-mas-de-series/) in which I have participated with, once more, an article on The […]
Channel-hopping a couple of Saturdays ago, I came across the documentary Classic Albums: Nirvana – Nevermind (2005) on BTV, the excellent local Barcelona TV channel (you may see the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lu48P8dZTk&list=RD2lu48P8dZTk). BTV is, as far as I know, the only public channel I have access to which bothers to broadcast a weekly series on […]
[This is my 400th post and I want to thank all of you, readers. I feel very embarrassed when someone sends me a message or approaches me with a kind word but it is also a great pleasure. I do hope you also get a little bit of that from reading my raving and ranting. […]
Yes, I finally saw yesterday Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It has been very hard to avoid the spoilers for a couple of weeks (yet I must also marvel at the conspiracy of silence to conceal some major plot turns!). Harder to miss were the tepid reactions of most professional reviewers. Given their warnings, I […]
I have just accepted tutoring an MA dissertation on how the new digital media conditions the task of the dancer and choreographer. What is an (English) Literature teacher doing supervising this? Let me retrace the steps. Since I have always been interested in the process of film adaptation, having published many articles about it, and […]
I have attended this week the international conference “New Typologies of (E/Im)Migration: Mobility and Transcultural Spaces” beautifully organized by my good friend José Manuel Estévez Sáa (http://www.josemanuelestevezsaa.com/). This was also the 17th Culture and Power International Conference, marking the twentieth anniversary of our seminar’s activities (http://www.cultureandpower.org/). I am not myself at all a specialist in […]
In the last fortnight I have attended two seminars on Affect Theory, one organized by the research group I am a member of, Construyendo Nuevas Masculinidades, and the other presented as a meeting between two research groups, one headed by Helena González of UB (Centre de Dona i Literatura) and the other by Belén Martín […]