M. John Harrison won yesterday the Booker Prize with his science-fiction novel The End of Everything. There will be endless pieces about whether sf fans have reason enough to feel happy that the genre has been finally recognized as a potential source of literature, but that’s not what I want to discuss. I found Harrison’s […]
I’m using for my subject Contemporary Literature in English passages from Robert Eaglestone’s Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013). This is a slim volume, as it corresponds to the series, with accessible language (unlike most literary criticism), and quite bold in its approach to a daunting topic: how to define and understand current […]
[WARNING! SPOILERS ABOUT STEPHEN KING’S NOVEL CARRIE] Like many other people, I saw Brian de Palma’s very popular 1976 film Carrie (scripted by Larry D. Cohen) before reading King’s 1974 novel. The question I’m exploring these days with my students is how and why the visualization contributed by audiovisual adaptation through production design, casting, […]
If I write here about the books I’m preparing, I eventually shame myself into writing them, so here we go. I had been reading for a while for a book on secondary characters in the European novel when it struck me that the committee judging the research exercises (or ‘sexenios’) might consider it Comparative Literature […]
Today I’ve received one of those blind peer reviewer reports which tells me how useless I am and how totally sub-standard my work is because… I mean, so many things that, really, I wonder that I’ve published anything at all. What the reviewers don’t know is that I no longer need to publish any more […]
I’m three classes away from finishing (on 28 May) my third/fourth year BA elective subject ‘English Prose: 21st Century Autobiographies and Memoirs’ and I’ve been drafting my conclusions. I have decided to share them here, together with a couple of lists. Each class (80-90 minutes) has consisted of the following: a mini-lecture (35 minutes) […]
The new book I present today, Exploring Reproduction and Gender in Contemporary Feminist Speculative Fiction: Mothers Out of this World, is a collective volume that I have co-edited with Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen, of the University of Zaragoza. This is the end of a long collaboration, initiated by Jessica herself, which has lasted about two years, perhaps […]
I was going to start writing my projected book on secondary characters, but then I realized that since it is not exclusively focused on English-language literature but on a selection of European novels in different languages, I might have problems presenting it in my next research assessment exercise (the board might value negatively my straying […]
In his famous, but rather absurd, essay “The Death of the Author” (1968), Roland Barthes ranted about the impending dismissal of authors from literary criticism, to be replaced by a sort of totally objective super-reader that would focus on the text as if sprung from language itself, with no active mediation from the author. The […]
It’s not at all usual for me to abandon an article at the writing stage, but today I’m giving myself permission. I’m sharing this misadventure in case you’ve also fallen down a rabbit hole and can’t climb out. Forgive me in advance for the long tale, I’m sort of exorcising this unfinished article from my […]