If you’re not a Potterhead and if you find the idea of buying movie-related merchandise absurd, you will find what I’m going to narrate here simply silly. If you are a Potterhead, I’m sure you will love it… When I started teaching the Harry Potter elective and about two thirds of my class declared they […]
One doesn’t read doctoral dissertations for pleasure, I’m sorry to say, but I have very much enjoyed reading Linda Wight’s Talking about Men: Conversations about Masculinities in Recent ‘Gender-bending’ Science Fiction (2009, http://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/11566/1/02whole.pdf). She had the very good idea of taking a selection of winners and nominees to the James Tiptree Jr., a prize awarded […]
This week my friend Bela Clúa has visited to introduce my students in the Harry Potter class to the basics of writing about heroes. She spoke to them about how heroic narratives have been famously studied by psychoanalysis (Carl Jung, Otto Rank) and by scholars interested in myth (Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye). Next she mentioned […]
I’m preparing my lecture/seminar on J.K. Rowling, the author, for tomorrow and I have finally decided to turn to my blog, see if writing a post clarifies my confused thoughts. The idea is to discuss with my students what kind of writer Rowling is from a Cultural Studies point of view, taking into account her […]
I have started teaching my elective subject ‘Cultural Studies in English: The Harry Potter Series’ this week… and it’s been a very good beginning. I have around 50 students, of which 8 (I think) are auditors (non-registered students who get no credits); they come from BA degrees such as Translation or Anthropology and three are […]
As we all know, the problem of how much reading a student is willing to do for a subject complicates enormously our task. A few weeks ago, one of our Erasmus students abroad explained that a typical Literature course in the university she’s visiting, Edinburgh, might have up to 10 books –basically one per week. […]
As I age I understand less and less the mechanism by which some stories are instantly embedded in our brains and other pass through leaving no trace. I keep lists of the books that I read and the films that I see like Japanese tourists who take photos of everything to fix the memories of […]
I’m reading the Harry Potter saga again –for the third time around– in preparation for my elective subject next semester. Also the academic materials that I’m going to use as background reading, and which include the Casebook recently edited (2012) by Hallett and Huey. In this volume there’s a very interesting piece by Pamela Ingleton, […]
My thanks to the prospective students of the Harry Potter elective for their positive feedback, it seems I’m on the right track regarding the issues they expect me to raise in class. Now, this post refers to a problem that I’m having regarding this subject in particular but that can be extended to any other […]
As a consequence of a post I published here last Christmas I have finally embarked on the very difficult mission of teaching J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series next year. Yes, very difficult, believe me. Since the subject is formally ‘Cultural Studies’ I have decided to use the first few weeks for an overview of this […]