I am currently reading Ruth Franklin’s 2016 biography of American author Shirley Jackson, subtitled A Rather Haunted Life, and I’ve come across a couple of passages in Chapter One (“Foundations: California 1916-1933”) I would like to comment on. Franklin informs us that Samuel C. Bugbee, “San Francisco’s first architect and Jackson’s great-great-grandfather” built in the […]
Happy new academic year! May it brings plenty of positive energy for teachers and students, and dispels all the dark clouds of anxiety and depression that plagued so many people last year. My first post of this new year deals with my Department’s book club. We have been running a club for a few years […]
My student Pascal Lemaire is working on a PhD dissertation on the genre of the technothriller and I have asked him for a list of recommended novels, since I am far more familiar with the movies. Technothrillers, as Pascal is discovering, are a conundrum as a genre because although they have millions of readers worldwide, […]
Continuing with the topic of my previous post, and because I have been preparing a talk about her, I’d like to focus here on a truly bad witch: Bellatrix Black Lestrange. Bellatrix has been the object of a few scholarly publications, none devoted to her alone (all to be found on Google Scholar; the MLA […]
My doctoral student Laura Luque is now giving the finishing touches to her excellent PhD dissertation on the positive representation of the witch as a figure of empowerment in contemporary YA fantasy literature. She has focused on Terry Pratchett, J.K. Rowling, Rin Chupeco and Kelley Armstrong, which is certainly enough, although as the lists in […]
I feel provoked to write today by an MA dissertation arguing that in American Psycho (1991) Bret Easton Ellis manipulates readers so that they share with its protagonist, Patrick Bateman, the pleasure he feels when he tortures, mutilates and kills his victims. I will award the student in question an A because she has researched […]
I’m inspired to write this post not so much by the death four days ago of acclaimed English novelist Martin Amis, at the age of 73 from oesophagus cancer, as by the obituary published in El Confidencial by Alberto Olmos, “Olvido y muerte de Martin Amis, el escritor que lo tuvo todo”. Amis (1949-2023), known […]
My second-year students need to write a paper on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, in which they must cite a minimum of three secondary sources. I give them a list of 23 topics from which they can choose, with the only restriction that only a maximum of 3 students can choose the same topic. In this […]
SPOILERS WARNING: This post deals with the nine Expanse novels and discusses the series’ ending. The Expanse is a series of nine space opera novels—Leviathan Wakes (2011), Caliban’s War (2012), Abaddon’s Gate (2013), Cibola Burn (2014), Nemesis Games (2015), Babylon’s Ashes (2016), Persepolis Rising (2017), Tiamat’s Wrath (2019) and Leviathan Falls (2021)—accompanied by a short […]
When I started thinking about today’s post, I had a certain feeling of déjà vu. Checking previous posts I found one of January 2014 titled “Underpaid and Overrated Authors: Hierarchical Reading in the Age of Globalization” in which I discussed an article published in The Guardian according to which, as the title reads, “Most writers […]