Comparative Literature is a strange discipline because it consists of seeing similarities between very dissimilar texts, usually written in different languages but also in the same language. The whole discipline depends on serendipity, as a particular scholar needs to think of particular connections that are not evident, a type of discovery that only happens quite […]
Estaba enseñando mi introducción a Drácula de Bram Stoker e incluí en la presentación de PowerPoint sobre los orígenes y el desarrollo del mito del vampiro, una foto de la primera vampiresa (o ‘vamp’) de película, Theda Bara (nacida Theodosia Goodman). Se la ve reclinada sobre el esqueleto de, suponemos, su última conquista masculina (puedes […]
He escrito hasta ahora dos entradas sobre el tema de la supervisión de estudiantes de doctorado (ver “A doctoral student abandons: At a loss what to advise…” de 2014, y “Supervising doctoral students: A complicated task” de 2015). En realidad, he publicado tres entradas más sobre los estudiantes de doctorado, pero estas dos están más […]
The title of today’s post is that of the volume I have edited together with my dear friend Isabel Santaulària, Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture: In Search of Good Men. Published a couple of weeks ago, the volume has been in the making for almost three years from conception to publication, a long […]
This post was going to be a formal review of a recent book for the SFRA Review. However, I eventually decided that I could not submit a text of this nature without fully reading the book in question, a task I found impossible to fulfil. Not because the book was not good enough (it is […]
When I wrote the post ‘Preparing for Disaster: Reading Post-Apocalyptic Fiction‘ in 2015, Covid-19 was still almost five years away into the future (the virus broke out in China’s city of Wuhan in December 2019, hence its name, but it spread worldwide in early 2020, with a three-month state of alarm and lockdown being declared […]
When I introduce second-year students to the basics of writing academic papers and they submit their first paper proposal (title, 100-abstract, 3-item valid academic bibliography) I warn them to use only post-1995 bibliography (perhaps I should update that to 21st century bibliography?). As I explain, even though in the paper they can use older sources, […]
I made a mistake when I borrowed Javier Cercas’ El punto ciego from the library, wrongly believing it was a volume by Javier Marías. I read the summary—the book gathers together five lectures delivered by the author when he was appointed Weidenfeld Chair of European Literature at St Anne’s College at Oxford in 2015—and I […]
NOTE: This post was originally written on 26 October 2021, but it’s published now, months later because of the cyberattack that UAB suffered then and that caused the temporary suspension of this blog Here is an excerpt of the talk I gave the doctoral students in our programme yesterday, 26 October 2021. The talk, intended […]
This post is inspired by two articles, one in The Guardian and one in The Critic, which discuss the possible end of the degrees in English language and Literature in England if things continue downhill, as they seem to be going. Before I start discussing in more detail the situation and the arguments, allow me […]