On 8th March, International Women’s Day, a group of women at my Facultat, led I believe by Prof. Teresa Camps, decided to decorate a very visible wall in one of the main corridors with four photos (about 50 x 50 cms) of the same series. The black and white photos show a young white woman, […]
My colleague Andrew Monnickendam gave a plenary lecture at the last AEDEAN conference on Scottish writer Mary Brunton (1778-1818), one of the authors he deals with in his new book The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations (Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone). His presentation of Brunton’s Self-Control (1811) did call my […]
I’m a big Kathryn Bigelow fan, which means that my personal impression about the very high quality of her newest film, Zero Dark Thirty, is totally unreliable. I don’t wish to review it formally here but I’ll say that it’s 160 minutes are thrilling, even though every one knows how they end. Bigelow’s film is […]
The research group I belong to, led by Àngels Carabí of UB and devoted to the study of masculinities in American fiction, received last Friday an illustrious visitor: Prof. Victor Seidler, an emeritus teacher of social theory at Goldsmiths in London (although he trained originally as a philosopher). I owe Prof. Seidler an important insight […]
This is the third post I write here on Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, which shows that a masterpiece is that kind of text that delivers something new every time the reader approaches it. In preparation for my classes, I read Nancy Gish’s essay “Jekyll and Hyde: The Pathology of […]
About a year ago I wrote an entry (20-X-2011) connecting Anne Brontë’s Gilbert, the hero of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Heathcliff, the hero-villain of her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. I still think that Anne bore Emily’s novel in mind as she wrote her own and that Gilbert is a more civilised version of […]
I read back-to-back Nicola Griffith’s acclaimed Ammonite (1993), just re-issued as an SF Masterwork, and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos (1986), as part of my current search for sf novels with interesting ideas about gender. Back in January I was wondering here whether I’d eventually write a paper on another one of them, David […]
Yesterday (17-X) I presented my little book Desafíos a la Heterosexualidad Obligatoria, together with Miquel Missé, author of Transsexualitats: Altres Mirades Possibles and Gerard Coll-Planas, author of La Carn i la Metàfora: Una Reflexió sobre el Cos a la Teoria Queer. At one point of the lively ensuing dialogue, we were asked about the resistance […]
An MA student, Rubén, asks me to supervise his dissertation on Richard Yates’s 1961 novel Revolutionary Road –a novel I promised myself not to touch ever after seeing the film adaptation (because of its very ugly plot). Yet, what can I do? I like his proposal to consider 1950s masculinity and so… I must read […]
I read with my class the interview in Oliver Twist between the whore Nancy and the lady Rose –both 17-year-old girls separated by a social abyss. Dickens speaks through each girl’s mouth, first to claim (through Nancy) that it’s not inborn malice but the bad luck of finding yourself in an appalling environment as a […]