I love documentaries. Not nature documentaries, whether they are of the cute, cheesy variety or of the ultra realistic kind –which, for some reason or other, always include grisly scenes of bigger animals killing smaller animals. I mean culture documentary films. My second dream job after university teacher, is ‘documentary film maker’. (Actually this is […]
Last Christmas holiday I published a post on the Harry Potter series which has led to my teaching next academic year an elective subject on Rowling’s dark yarn. Having enjoyed season one of TV series A Game of Thrones, I told myself that perhaps soon it should be the turn for George R. R. Martin’s […]
One of the masterpiece I have been meaning to read since my student’s days (but never got round to) is John Steinbeck’s monumental The Grapes of Wrath (1939). I love John Ford’s film adaptation of 1940, but I’ve kept on putting off reading the book. Sorry but Steinbeck is one of those authors that makes […]
My entry of 6 June 2012, about the poor results of the quiz on the handbook Introduction to English Literature which first year students must take, offended, I know, many students. Two sent furious comments, criticising me for publicising students’ mistakes (even though I did so anonymously, nobody was ‘outed’). A girl was particularly angry. […]
If I had a euro for every time a student has handed in an essay with no title, I’d be… in less fear of the current crisis. Not rich but possibly in possession of, say, a much better handbag. Actually, if I think about it, there are two variations to this problem: essays with no […]
In the last few weeks both my UAB and my UOC students have been learning (English) poetry. To my dismay and that of my teaching colleagues, even though we have insisted that they should NOT produce text commentaries and we have provided them with samples of the kind of argumentative essay we want to see […]
My colleagues in ‘20th century English Literature’ (first-year) and myself have decided to use one spare week that we programmed after the unit on British Poetry for songs. I opened a Forum for students to contribute songs that they found interesting because of the lyrics but since the messages are trickling rather than pouring down […]
Granta is a British literary magazine (and publisher) that earned much notoriety, and kudos, back in 1983 for publishing a list of 20 ‘young’ British novelists (under 40) assumed to become soon literary stars. Granta got many of the names right, and the first list remains still today a monument to literary clairvoyance: it boasted […]
Not even on the day of her flamboyant funeral have the Spanish media managed to pronounce Margaret Thatcher’s surname correctly: it’s ‘zatcha’ (more or less), not ‘tacher’. I suppose that the visual similarities with the word ‘teacher’ to our boorish, monolingual Spanish eyes are responsible for the habitual mispronunciation but this is nonetheless annoying. It’s […]
As La Vanguardia, among other newspapers, published this week only one third of all new students in Catalan universities possess a sufficient command of English (that is to say, B2 or First Certificate; see www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20130406/54372064211/universitarios-acceden-sin-nivel-minimo-ingles.html). The local government’s Department of Economy and Knowledge (‘Coneixement’), which also runs Catalan universities, is planning to make First Certificate […]