In the process of preparing two very small selections of Victorian poems and essays for our second year students, I’ve gone through a number of the main anthologies in the field. To tell you the truth, I’m quite amused by what I’ve found. And also disappointed. I’ll name a few volumes. For poetry: Victorian Women […]
Among the myriad things we, teachers, do in July one is (re-)reading the set texts for the coming academic year and, in some cases, seeing the corresponding film adaptation (on DVD, self-financed) to check whether it might be of use to complement the book (also self-financed). I personally enjoy very much doing research on film […]
I first mentioned Roger Casement here in relation to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (see entry for 12-XII) and, later, in my review of Mario Vargas Llosa’s El sueño del Celta (2-I), a novel based on his tragic life. In the meantime, I have spent 60 euros of public money to purchase for the UAB library […]
I read on the train –how/where else?– John Berger’s brief novel From A to X: A Story in Letters (2008) and I’m moved as I hadn’t been in a long time by what I can only describe as its exquisite prose. Some readers, as I see in Amazon, are annoyed by Berger’s vagueness about where […]
First posting of the new year: happy 2011! I don’t wish to turn this blog into a space for reviewing but, as happens, I’ve been reading Vargas Llosa’s El sueño del celta (2010) and I do feel the need to vent my deep disappointment. You may recall from a recent post that I recommended this […]
I’ve just gone through Conrad’s Heart of Darkness once more, this time to teach it almost simultaneously in my post-grad subject on “The Vietnam War” for our MA, and in my under-grad subject on Victorian Literature. In the first case, I’ve also focused, of course, on Coppola’s Apocalypse Now!, which seems to me a worse […]
Last week I wrote that even Dr. Lecter would find Mr. Hyde scary and since then I’ve been mulling over why cannibalism never comes up in connection with Stevenson’s masterpiece. Actually, we had a lively discussion in class about the worst crime we imagine Hyde committing, and because the contemporary readings of the text focus […]
I’ve read once more The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as I’ll start teaching it again tomorrow –actually, the second time this semester as my UOC students have already gone through it– and I marvel at how powerful Stevenson’s writing is. I also puzzle about how to explain to the students that […]
I ask the students to read a passage in Great Expectations which ends with the sentence “I must obey.” One of them pretends to mishear me and asks in surprise “masturbate?” The whole class laughs at the fake Freudian slip and we start then a conversation on Pip’s (and Heathcliff’s) strange sexual lives. If they […]
A bright girl student pours down onto a long, singular email message the many reasons why she’s disappointed with Dickens: she “cannot see the literature” in Great Expectations, she dislikes Dickens’s too obvious moralising, and, generally, she finds him unable to impress her with a deep vision of what being human is about. He ‘doesn’t […]