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 […]
This post is inspired by two very different book reviews. On 7 November Laura Miller published in Slate the review of Rebecca Yarros’s Iron Flame. The piece is titled “‘I’ve Been Yours for Longer Than You Could Ever Imagine”: Is the dragon-school ‘romantasy’ series that’s dominating the bestseller lists actually any good?” On 10 November […]
I am currently reading Ruth Franklin’s 2016 biography of American author Shirley Jackson, subtitled A Rather Haunted Life, and I’ve come across a couple of passages in Chapter One (“Foundations: California 1916-1933”) I would like to comment on. Franklin informs us that Samuel C. Bugbee, “San Francisco’s first architect and Jackson’s great-great-grandfather” built in the […]
The X-Files, one of the most important television series ever, was launched 30 years ago today, on 10 September 1993. The series, created by Chris Carter, narrated in 218 episodes broadcast along eleven seasons (1993-2002, 2016, 2018), and two films (1998, 2008), the cases investigated by FBI Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully […]
Continuing with the topic of my previous post, and because I have been preparing a talk about her, I’d like to focus here on a truly bad witch: Bellatrix Black Lestrange. Bellatrix has been the object of a few scholarly publications, none devoted to her alone (all to be found on Google Scholar; the MLA […]
My doctoral student Laura Luque is now giving the finishing touches to her excellent PhD dissertation on the positive representation of the witch as a figure of empowerment in contemporary YA fantasy literature. She has focused on Terry Pratchett, J.K. Rowling, Rin Chupeco and Kelley Armstrong, which is certainly enough, although as the lists in […]
A couple of weeks ago I gave a lecture for a general audience on women and science fiction, which was also the closing session in a course organized by Jordi-Agustí Font at Badalona’s Espai Betúlia. I was the only woman lecturer in a series of six sessions and, typically, I was asked to lecture on […]
I’m returning to James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse, which I discussed two posts ago, this time to reflect on the strategies required to face such a long read for academic purposes. Whereas mainstream and literary novels are usually published as stand-alone volumes, series abound in genre fiction. They are sometimes bound by the presence […]
[WARNING: THIS POST DISCUSSES EPISODE 8, “ALLOYED”, OF AMAZON’S SERIES THE RINGS OF POWER] I’ve been watching with a mixture of boredom and annoyance Amazon’s The Rings of Power, telling myself there was no point in writing about it to vent my indignation as a Tolkien reader (though not a big fan). I agree with […]
The first novel about Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published by Bloomsbury on 26 June 1997, already 25 years ago today. This post looks back to that date, to celebrate it, and forward to next November, when Barcelona’s Witch Market will finally return and all of us, local […]