I am mystified by the expression ‘an obscure professor’. Since ‘obscure’ is so close to Spanish ‘oscuro’ (meaning, of course, ‘dark’) I tend to think of people like Professor Snape, who teaches ‘Defence against the Dark Arts’ at Harry Potter’s school Hogwarts as an ‘obscure professor’. ‘Obscure’ has diverse meanings, according to the Oxford Dictionary, […]
Italian writer and editor Roberto Calasso has been recently news in Spain for winning the quite new Premio Formentor de las Letras, also awarded so far to a few Spanish-language writers that he names among his favourite: Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Javier Marías, Enrique Vila-Matas y Ricardo Piglia (no women…). In at least two interviews, […]
If you check the internet you will soon come up with a flurry of news items and articles explaining that the human attention span is now shorter than that of goldfish. Whereas goldfish can focus their whole attention for 9 seconds, humans can only manage 8. The figure for 2000 was 10 seconds, which is […]
We, readers, seem to believe that the permanence of writers is automatic. Nothing needs to be done to have any book we want at our command, whether it is first-hand or second-hand. Only irrelevant authors and works sink into nothingness. We smile smugly whenever someone praises a long-forgotten author nobody else has heard of, never […]
Allow me to take Manuel de Pedrolo (1918-1990) as the centre of the argumentation I want to develop here. Pedrolo is a key author of Catalan literature, to which he contributed about 100 works in all genres (poetry, drama, novel, journalism) and also his translations of first-rank international work by American and European novelists. He […]
This is a time-capsule post, of the kind that gets written with the author expecting to check in five-years time what really happened. Like many people all over the world–as shown by the instantaneous collapse of the stock market–I expected Britons to have voted in favour of staying in the European Union. This is a […]
[Just one sentence to say that while the activities I have been engaged in this week –exams (both oral and written), yearly doctoral interviews, last minute BA dissertation revisions– are absolutely necessary I hate how they use up the energy needed to write. With no writing (and I realize this is another sentence) it feels […]
(No, I’m not suffering from writer’s block, which would be ironic given my last post. The problem is that every subject I’ve come up in the last ten days for raving and ranting about here is so problematic that I have given up all of them. The one I am dealing with her seems to […]
I keep on telling my students that nobody is doing research on what I call fabulation–the writer’s ability to string together an imaginary story–but it turns out I am partly wrong. My mistake lies in having supposed that this research should be a branch of psychology when it is actually also a branch of biology […]
Readers: you’re in for a rough ride today, as I’ll be dealing with an essay on philosophy by Rosi Braidotti. No, I don’t usually read philosophy but I simply had to read her volume The Posthuman, given my own interest in how posthumanism functions in science fiction (see “Posthumanismo y diplomacia: La serie de John […]