Today I’m writing a sort of metablogging post, for two reasons: I wish to comment on my most recent book, Passionate Professing: The Context and Practice of Teaching Literature, which contains a selection of posts published here, and I have just been invited to write an article on the experience of writing this blog for Nexus, the review of AEDEAN (Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos). I have just handed in this article and, inevitably, there will be some overlapping with today’s post, but I’ll do my best to give matters a different twist.
Once a friend asked me whether I consider this blog a personal or a professional activity, taking into account that blogs are not among the list of activities the Ministry accepts for our research assessment. Incidentally, the Ministry assessed knowledge transfer a few years ago but I failed the examination on the grounds that my activities are not sufficiently diverse (meaning that I don’t bring in money by producing patents or tutoring doctoral students in international programmes). I decided then that my blog is 100% professional, anyway, and 100% personal, a sort of strange hobby to which I devote my mental energies once a week. I used to write whenever inspiration struck but I decided a few years ago that keeping Monday morning, when I usually don’t teach, for the blog helped me to structure my task and my week. It’s a sort of self-appointed date with my brain, to air and exercise it, in the same way others use time to go to the gym (an activity I loathe with all the might of a child once neglected by a bunch of inept gym teachers).
About two years ago, Jesús López-Peláez, a Literature teacher of the Universidad de Jaén, approached me on behalf of their publishing house to consider producing a book with a selection of posts from this blog. That was a lovely surprise! He suggested as well that I should reuse my introduction Enseñar Literatura Inglesa, a self-published e-book I uploaded onto the digital repository of my university possibly ten years ago. This text consists of the introduction to my report (or memoria) for the state examination (or oposición) for tenure, which I passed back in 2002. As happens, Nexus has been publishing in its last three issues articles by Tomás Monterrey (2022.2), Fernando Galván (2023.1) and Socorro Suárez (2023.2), all three illustrious names of English Studies in Spain, dealing with the national history of the discipline. It seems, then, that my book is quite by accident also part of an impulse to rethink who we are as specialists in this area and why it has taken a particular shape in Spain. I must certainly thank Jesús for the idea and the support, for it would not have occurred to me to approach a quality university press like UJA with the volume he proposed.
You’ll have to read either the articles by professors Monterrey, Galván, and Suárez or my two books for details but, basically, English Studies were established in Spain in 1952 for reasons that mix the personal initiative of cosmopolitan academics such as Emilio Lorenzo and Esteve Pujals, with the timid opening of Francisco Franco’s regime towards the Anglosphere dominated by the USA. Our roots, however, lie in the German construction of Philology, which explains why still today our degrees and Departments mix linguistic sciences with literary and cultural humanities. As we all know, but are not saying, this is a complex mixture which is leading to a widening gulf between sections in the same Departments, no matter how placid interaction may be with our peers on the other side.
In the first part of Passionate Professing, then, I deal with the history of the area both in their Anglo-American origins and in Spain but also with many others issues attached to, specifically, the teaching of English Literature: the difference between English Literature and Literature in English, the organization of English Literature as a subject of study as regards periodization and literary movements, the problem of text selection in relation to the diverse genres and the canon, and the question of the critical and theoretical models in the study of English Literature. I started thinking about these matters, as I have noted, more than twenty years ago, and I updated my first version of Enseñar Literatura Inglesa about ten years ago. There has not been, however, a radical upheaval in how we teach and research English Literature because, as I explain, in essence the pedagogical and research models established in the 1990 still persist. The bibliography we use has grown so much that nobody can be up-to-date in any subarea, and teaching is now beset by threatening digital matters such as the recent rise of ChatGPT, but the practice and the corresponding controversies and conflicts are similar. Bologna did away with the Licenciaturas to introduce the Grados and the Master’s degrees, but as a profession we have stubbornly resisted the need to have deep conversations about what we do, beginning, as I have noted with the awkward coexistence of Linguistics and Literature, and following with whether we can really go on teaching Literature to students who don’t read.
The second part of the book consists of a selection of posts from this blog, which forced me if not to re-read all I had written since 2010, at least to check all the entries and consider which ones had stood reasonably the test of time. I don’t like reading my own texts, and generally find fault with everything I have published, so I truly had to make an effort to sit down and go through the hundreds of posts I have written. Taking into account the first part of Passionate Professing, I decided to focus only on the posts most directly connected to teaching, leaving research and general comment aside. One thing I quickly noted is that I complain a lot, or the other way round: I tend to write more about the difficulties in teaching than about the successes, though I do make a point of praising students at any level when matters work well. Inescapably, one of the main functions of this blog is venting, so I was hardly surprised to read my rantings about several key issues, though at least I think I have managed to be constructive rather than simply angry. I rediscovered in the process of reading myself many moments of my teaching life I had forgotten about, some happier than others, but was a bit dismayed to see that along the years I have been writing about quite similar problems and crises because at a political level so very little is being done to improve our work conditions. There is a serious disconnection between the teachers in any discipline and levels and the authorities that is not healing at all.
Whereas the point of publishing a book is clear enough, the point of writing a blog is less certain. I started because my dear friend Gerardo Rodríguez Salas—a wonderful academic, poet and human being—suggested that I needed an outlet for the many ideas boiling in my head. I don’t exaggerate if I say that Gerardo was concerned for my mental health, and the possible literal bursting of my troubled head if I didn’t do anything about it. I was going through a complicated time, with many peer-reviewing problems and a great discomfort with the obligation to be part of a specific research group, and I just wanted to be able to say what was on my mind. My university was then promoting blogs as a tool for academic communication, and one thing led to the other, and here I am thirteen years later. I have written this morning in my article for Nexus that I write fundamentally to keep my sanity, and this is still true, though I have also become increasingly addicted to writing in a way I was not before launching the blog. I still find academic writing very hard, as fitting in so much bibliography easily saps my interest and energies, but writing here is truly enjoyable. I called my blog ironically The Joys of Teaching Literature but the irony turns out to be that the blog itself is about the joys of writing it.
I assume that if the University of Jaén and Nexus are interested in my blog, this means that it is somehow working for other persons, and not only for myself. I have never known who reads me, having refused to check any statistics, and I have always received very few comments (in the current UAB platform they are disactivated). I’ll explain, however, that I almost stopped writing in the first months after launching the blog when I received an extremely nasty anonymous comment. I’m not interested in social media, and I’m not used to being the object of negative comments, and that was a scary moment. I see myself, in essence, working in my little corner, creating content for the internet to be a little more cultured, and reaching out to just whoever is interested. I don’t read myself blogs regularly, but I do read lots of posts for my research and I value very much that posts written sometimes many years ago still illuminate issues of the present. It’s a little like scattering flowers, hoping someone will pick them up still fresh and nice-smelling. I wax cheesy, sorry.
To conclude, I’d like to thank once more Jesús López-Peláez for having helped me to produce Passionate Professing, and UJA for the absolutely beautiful edition. The blog is an entirely digital object and seeing the handsome volume in my hands is a real pleasure. I feel honoured and vindicated that this book exists, for with it UJA has made a point of ignoring the lines dividing academic publishing and what we call in Spanish divulgación, which has no exact equivalent in English beyond the clumsy ‘knowledge dissemination’. Some of the posts are close to being papers, in extension and because they include secondary sources, but I always try to stress that we need to find a more flexible register to discuss English Literature (the discipline) and literature (the books). I thank in that sense the wonderful cultural journalists of The Guardian, Slate and, in Spanish, El País and El Confidencial for their example. They are my teachers, though I don’t know if I am a good student.
And, finally, I called the book Passionate Professing because this is what I do as a teacher of English Literature: to profess my faith in literature and generally culture, with all my passion. Next time someone uses the word ‘professor’ consider this.