Let me return to the idea of how statistic impossibility undermines our common ground from another angle. This came up time ago in conversation with a colleague at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ángel Mateos (another SF fan!!). We were wondering one day about how many readers any of our publications actually get and how […]
Recently, I spoke with a doctoral student working for her PhD dissertation on Herman Melville’s more neglected texts. To my surprise, she complained that the field of American Studies in Spain is saturated with research on 20th century and contemporary texts with a strong racial and ethnic component. This is why, in her view, 19th […]
This issue of whether the internet and the related digital resources make literary research faster comes up in conversation with our new MA students and with a doctoral student, now finishing her dissertation. Actually, I seem to have pretty much forgotten what it was like to do research before the internet although I wrote my […]
This post is not so much about teaching as about writing academic essays. I’m working on a paper on the concept of sexiness as regards men under the female heterosexual gaze and for the umpteenth time I’ll have to quote Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” (In The Sexual Subject: A […]