STRAWSON’S DIACHRONICS VS. EPISODICS: BEGINNING TO THINK ABOUT AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I was planning to teach this academic year an elective subject on narrative non-fiction of a journalistic type but I will be teaching instead autobiography and memoirs. I have included non-fiction as one of the four categories of contemporary prose students need to read in my Contemporary English Literature subject (the other three are varieties […]

THE GENERATIONAL DIVIDE IN ENGLISH STUDIES (IN SPAIN)

A week ago, as soon as I returned from the national conference of English Studies, I sent a joint email to five young scholars who had discussed SF in their presentations. I presented myself as the Spanish representative of the Science Fiction Research Association and the author of a recent book on masculinity and SF. […]

THIRTY YEARS OF CULTURAL STUDIES IN SPAIN: SUCCESS AND FAILURE

I have just come back from Vitoria-Gasteiz, where the colleagues of the English Department at the University of the Basque Country have organized the 48th AEDEAN conference, a yearly meeting which gathers together many Spanish specialists in English Studies. David Walton, a recently retired teacher at the Universidad de Murcia, and a dear colleague, proposed […]

CRAVING FOR CREATIVITY IN LITERARY RESEARCH (AFTER A SEMINAR)

A week ago, the research group I currently belong to, Beyond Postmemory, held the seminar “Nature Remembers: War, Trauma and Environmental Postmemory,” in which we discussed how not only human beings but also nature can suffer, so to speak, from PTSD and show signs of trauma long after a conflict. Postmemory, a concept coined by […]

BEST OF CHILDREN’S PICTURE BOOKS: THE ATLANTIC’S SELECTION (AND A PERSONAL TOUCH)

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 […]

THE FUTURE OF MEN BEYOND PATRIARCHY: MY NEW BOOK ON SF BY MEN

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 […]

OMINOUS PROPOSALS: AI-DEPENDENT STUDENTS CANNOT BE OUR EDUCATIONAL PARTNERS

Today I’m reading an article by, I quote, “Mary Curnock Cook CBE, who chairs the Dyson Institute and is a Trustee at HEPI, and Bess Brennan, Chief of University Partnerships with Cadmus, which is running a series of collaborative events with UK university leaders about the challenges and opportunities of generative AI in higher education.” […]

WHY VICTORIAN NOVELS ARE SO LONG (AND WHY WE LACK PATIENCE TO READ THEM)

You might think that Victorian novels are so long because of their serialization in weekly or monthly instalments, sold either as part of periodical publications or independently. However, this business practice, introduced by Charles Dickens’s publisher, Chapman, with the serialization of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (19 instalments between March 1836 and November […]

WHAT LIES BEHIND LITERARY THEORY: NOTES ON THE DISCUSSION OF CHARACTER

I’m beginning to read (and in some cases re-read) the bibliography for my future book on secondary characters. I wish I could jump straight into the matter that interests me, for which there is relatively scant bibliography, but I need for my theoretical framework in the introduction an overview of the secondary sources discussing the […]