APPLYING CULTURAL STUDIES TO OUR LOCAL UNIVERSITIES: IT’S URGENT [In case you’re wondering, yes, two posts today – I haven’t been writing much recently and the ideas pile up…] I’m going to refer here again to the 84-page report that a committee of professors submitted last 15 February to Minister Wert, for the reform of […]
Exactly a year ago tomorrow I published a post called ‘A Striking Strike’ as we, students and teachers, were also on strike, like today. I wrote then and I repeat now that I’m not joining the strike as (I’m quoting myself): “a) my not teaching students for one day does not bother anyone, [much less […]
My colleague David Owen emails us, UAB’s English Literature Teachers, a juicy article from a Guardian blog: “Library lending figures: which books are most popular?” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/feb/08/library-lending-figures-books-most-popular). The subheading cheerfully announces that “James Patterson leads the list of the UK’s most borrowed authors in 2011/12” –I had to think twice and end up using Wikipedia to […]
I was showing my city, Barcelona, to a friend from Madrid almost 20 years ago and when I explained that the Ciutadella (the Citadel) had been built to humiliate the city inhabitants after the Castilian takeover of 1714, he asked in surprise, “What do you mean ‘Castilian takeover’?”. Gosh, did I get that wrong at […]
At the end of a rainy afternoon I watch the 2003 documentary Stupidity (on YouTube). It’s not very good but at least the producers are brave enough to address the question of why stupidity is so popular in our days (much more so when the documentary was filmed, during Bush jr.’s first mandate). The key […]
One of our Erasmus students at Edinburgh emails us the reading list for one of her subjects, a crash course on ‘Scottish Fiction’ (third year, I guess): Week 1. Introduction; extracts from Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker (1771) and James Barker, The Wonder of All the Gay World (1749) Week 2. Walter Scott, The Heart of […]
Two years ago, on September 19 2010, I started publishing my ranting and raving on teaching English Literature (and other academic matters) here. I am very much surprised myself by the frequency and regularity of my postings, which now amount to 100,000 words, a long book. Writing this blog, my journal of the plague years […]
On Wednesday 12 I learned that according to ‘QS World University Rankings 2012-2013’, the university I work for, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, is the best in Spain, followed by the Universitat de Barcelona. It is also number 176 in the list of the top 200 in the world (QS considers 2,500 universities in total, 700 […]
I read Daniel Defoe’s ultra-realistic fake diary Journal of the Plague Year (1722) with great pleasure a few weeks ago. I was intending to devote the whole post today to Defoe’s novel but reality insists on intruding, this form in the shape of a new pay cut (civil servants will not receive the Christmas pay […]
I’m back from a conference, as usual with mixed feelings. Taking a break from admin work and students to focus on sharing ideas with academic peers is always refreshing, much more so when each day ends with dinner in good company and in a beautiful town, as was the case. Yet, inevitably I wonder why […]