I based my last lecture for my elective subject on audiovisual adaptations and production design on Sarah Cardwell’s volume Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester UP, 2002). In what must have been originally her PhD dissertation, Cardwell vindicates the specific aesthetics of television and focuses on four case studies: Brideshead Revisited (1981), Pride […]
[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, […]
Normally, I write the posts in English (for I must practice the language, particularly in an informal register, being a non-native speaker) and I translate them into Spanish, with the help of Word’s automatic translator, which is simply wonderful. Today, however, I’m doing this the other way round because the post is inspired by a […]
I’ve had the honour of being a guest speaker at the seventh doctoral seminar that AEDEAN (Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-norteamericanos) has organized at the Universidad de Cantabria, in Santander. This has been held less than one month after the conference organized by ASYRAS (Association of Young Researchers on Anglophone Studies), at the University of […]
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 […]