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) […]
I don’t know if I’m suffering from writers’ block but it’s the first time since I started this blog back in 2010 that I feel I might be exhausting my topics. I’ve been trying to write something for the last four days, and I have finally decided to clear my schedule and force myself to […]
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 […]
As I have mentioned I’ll be soon teaching an elective subject on autobiographies and memoirs (in English). In preparation, I’ve been putting together a list of 100 remarkable pre-21st century texts in those genres, apart from the list of 21st century books my students need to read (each student chooses four from this list). This […]
I was planning to teach this academic year an elective subject on narrative non-fiction of a journalistic type but I will be teaching instead autobiography and memoirs. I have included non-fiction as one of the four categories of contemporary prose students need to read in my Contemporary English Literature subject (the other three are varieties […]
2025 is turning out to be one of the worst years in my life as a reader, for two reasons. One is that I find it harder and harder to find novels that interest me, of any type. The other is that since Trump’s election, I’m spending at least two hours a day reading the […]