Happy new academic year! May it brings plenty of positive energy for teachers and students, and the thorough defeat of patriarchal darkness in all fronts and nations. I’ll begin my fifteenth year as a blogger (yes, time passes!!), with a reminder that the all the yearly volumes can be found here, including the Spanish-language volumes […]
This is the last post of the current academic year (2023-24), in which I have written relatively few posts (only 39) because I have been writing yet another book (Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction by Men: No Plans for the Future, Liverpool UP) and getting the Spanish translation ready, both for next year. Nothing saps […]
One of my colleagues has just retired and among the many books of his extensive library that he has given away (for that’s what happens with the books we store in our offices) I have rescued John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? (Faber & Faber, 2005). I have very fond memories of reading Carey’s […]
I was going to write about my increasingly worrying addiction to GoodReads. In the end, though, this has become a post about the deprofessionalization of book reviewing, based on a consideration of the very diverse influence of reviewers Michiko Kakutani and Emily May, the former a stalwart of The New York Times and the latter […]
When we started working on the new 2021 syllabus, my Literature colleagues and I came to the conclusion that our students have too little contact with the contemporary world. Our undergrads take in the first year an Introduction to English Literature, which basically covers the British and Irish 20th century, beginning with James Joyce’s “The […]
Memory is a funny thing. I have been digging into my CV to prepare this post and what I have found does not quite match my recollections. I was under the impression that I have been teaching Victorian Literature every year since I was hired in 1991, except the year that I spent in Scotland […]
Even though I have been teaching H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) for a few years now, it seems I have not written about this novel here. A bit odd. Since I am most likely saying goodbye to it, this is perhaps the right moment to discuss its racist, colonial content, the issue on […]
I have just marked 70 paper proposals that my second-year Victorian Literature students have submitted and since the feedback I need to offer might be useful beyond my class, I’m offering it here as a sort of open tutorial. In our English Studies BA we start using secondary sources in the first year, but […]
I’m returning again after a couple of previous posts (see here the more recent one and here the older one) to the matter of nonfiction, which occupies me because I’m planning to teach an elective subject if not next year, then the following. As I explained in my previous posts, I find the label nonfiction […]
Last week I wrote about the sheer amount of bibliography we are using in academic work. I neglected, however, to mention that in textual analysis primary sources are occupying less and less space. In the presentation of my volume La verdad sin fin: Expediente X back in September, Iván Gómez praised me for having the […]