I don’t know if I’m suffering from writers’ block but it’s the first time since I started this blog back in 2010 that I feel I might be exhausting my topics. I’ve been trying to write something for the last four days, and I have finally decided to clear my schedule and force myself to […]
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 […]
In his famous, but rather absurd, essay “The Death of the Author” (1968), Roland Barthes ranted about the impending dismissal of authors from literary criticism, to be replaced by a sort of totally objective super-reader that would focus on the text as if sprung from language itself, with no active mediation from the author. The […]
As I have mentioned I’ll be soon teaching an elective subject on autobiographies and memoirs (in English). In preparation, I’ve been putting together a list of 100 remarkable pre-21st century texts in those genres, apart from the list of 21st century books my students need to read (each student chooses four from this list). This […]
I’m writing today out of stubbornness, because if I let a third blank week go by I fear that I might give up entirely this blog. I’m procrastinating my proper academic writing (an article and a book chapter have been waiting for too long), and I worry that if I also delay writing yet another […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]