It’s evening, after dinner, time to relax and choose a film to watch from whatever platform you subscribe. This means employing about two hours on consuming a story, leaving aside the fifteen minutes (or more) it may take to select a minimally enticing movie, unless you have preselected and placed some on your list. If […]
At the end of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) replicant Roy Batty shows his humanity shortly before dying by recalling all he has lived and concluding that, with his death, “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain”, a moving line which actor Rutger Hauer contributed to the film, ignoring the […]
The other article that has interested me and, in this case, appalled me is Laura Miller’s “The Unlikely Author Who’s Absolutely Dominating the Bestseller List” for Slate on the current US top best-selling novelist: Colleen Hoover. Miller’s analysis led me to Stephanie McNeal’s similar piece, “How Colleen Hoover Became The Queen Of BookTok” for BuzzFeed, […]
In my last post I argued that highly creative literature is practically dead, and that part of this foretold death is due to the dominance of the novel written by authors who do not care for literary prose. A few days later, Domingo Ródenas de Moya published in the culture supplement of El País, Babelia, […]
My post today continues from the last one in the sense that I want to consider here why the novel occupies the first position in the ranks of all the literary texts. In fact, I want to consider how come we have confused narrative with literature, additionally reducing fiction only to the novel, the novella, […]
Michael Quinion explains in his beautiful online dictionary of idioms World Wide Words the origin of the expression ‘having a whale of a time’, meaning enjoying yourself enormously. The idiom originates, as it easy to surmise, in the idea that whales are big animals to which big things can be compared. Apparently, Quinion informs his […]
I have an immensely talented doctoral student from Australia, and when I asked her whether she has considered applying for a job at a university back home, I got all confused because she started telling me that fees have gone up dramatically, and this makes things complicated. Sure, I replied, but I meant applying for […]
In a recent teachers’ meeting the pressing issue of students’ low attendance this last semester came up. I have not been teaching but my colleagues tell me less than 50% of the students have attended classes, which is even lower than what I saw in the first semester, when we were all still wearing facemasks […]
The one who should be writing this post today is my PhD student Pascal Lemaire since he has chosen to deal with the technothriller as his topic of research. However, I am myself curious about some of the points he is raising about this genre, so here I am. Back in 2014 Pascal published in […]
One of experts interviewed in the collective volume edited by psychologist Jean-François Marmion, The Psychology of Stupidity (2020; originally Psychologie de la Connerie, 2018; trans. Liesl Schillinger), to which I devoted my post of 4 March, was moral philosopher Aaron James. Having now read his splendid monograph Assholes: A Theory (2012), I would like to […]