The Joys of Teaching Literature, started in September 2010 and with a Spanish version since July 2021, is a blog for ranting and raving about teaching and researching English Literature, Cultural Studies, and Gender Studies, and other aspects of the Anglophone world. I publish a post once a week, usually on Monday. Please, download the yearly volumes for free or read the volume collecting some of the entries (Passionate Professing: The Context and Practice of English Literature, 2023). The comments option is not available, sorry, but you may contact me through my e-mail address, Sara.Martin@uab.cat. The contents of this blog are protected by a type 4 Creative Common License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (by-nc-nd)).

  • WORKING, STUDYING AND THE EVER RISING FEES: SOME UGLY THOUGHTS

    [Just one sentence to say that while the activities I have been engaged in this week –exams (both oral and written), yearly doctoral interviews, last minute BA dissertation revisions– are absolutely necessary I hate how they use up the energy needed to write. With no writing (and I realize this is another sentence) it feels…

  • PATOLOGÍAS DE LA REALIDAD VIRTUAL BY TERESA LÓPEZ-PELLISA: A REVIEW

    Patologías de la realidad virtual: Cibercultura y ciencia ficción (2015, Fondo de Cultura Económica) by Teresa López-Pellisa is a necessary book. As Naief Yehya writes in the Prologue, “Cada vez es más claro que en nuestro tiempo las relaciones sentimentales con los dispositivos tecnológicos materiales o immateriales han dejado de ser una extraña perversión para…

  • CLASS IN THE CLASSROOM: RE-STARTING THE CONVERSATION

    A couple of days after publishing my previous post, I continued the conversation about the low level of students’ participation in class with the colleagues who started it. This was, as usual, in the middle of the corridor and, taking advantage of the sudden emergence from her office of our emeritus professor I asked her…

  • LOSING THE BATTLE: THE VICTORY OF THE LECTURE OVER THE SEMINAR

    Once, while still a second-year undergrad, I took a year-long course on 18th and 19th century Spanish fiction during which I never met the teacher face to face. No wonder I have forgotten her name. She was a brilliant lecturer and I recall fondly many of the books she lectured on, a selection which included…

  • THE FIFTY-YEAR CRISIS: A PECULIAR TURNING POINT

    (No, I’m not suffering from writer’s block, which would be ironic given my last post. The problem is that every subject I’ve come up in the last ten days for raving and ranting about here is so problematic that I have given up all of them. The one I am dealing with her seems to…