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)).

  • KATHARINE BURDEKIN’S SWASTIKA NIGHT IN THE TIMES OF THE HANDMAID’S TALE: A WARNING ABOUT PATRIARCHAL ENSLAVEMENT

    I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) many years ago before seeing the unfairly neglected film adaptation with the late Natasha Richardson as Offred, directed in 1990 by Volker Schlöndorff and written by none other than Nobel Prize award-winner Harold Pinter. I have not seen, thank you very much, the ongoing HBO series, now…

  • AN EXTREMELY GUILTY PLEASURE: THE GREATEST SHOWMAN I recall from my childhood years how annoyed my father grew every time there was a musical film on TV and the actors burst out singing. I am confused to this day about whether the songs were also dubbed or left in the original English version (with no…

  • A PERSISTENT BUNCH: DOCTORAL STUDENTS AGAINST THE WORLD

    Yesterday we spent our working day going through the yearly interviews with our doctoral candidates–it seems, then, a good moment to ponder the use of doctoral programmes. To begin with, a reminder: only a very small minority of the individuals who practice medicine are properly speaking ‘doctors’; most just have a degree (a BA) in…

  • IN MIDDLE-EARTH AGAIN: TOLKIEN (AND WILLIAM MORRIS)

    I’m re-reading again The Lord of the Rings these days, for the third time. J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) is not one of my great passions as a reader or researcher but I acknowledge the immense importance that he has as a major contributor to English Literature, and not just to fantasy. What he offers in his…

  • AN UNSOLVED PROBLEM: ZYGMUNT BAUMAN’S MODERNITY AND THE HOLOCAUST

    The saddest paper I have ever written is “De la Primera Guerra Mundial al Holocausto: El uso de la tecnología en la destrucción en masa del cuerpo humano” (see http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/sites/gent.uab.cat.saramartinalegre/files/Primera%20Guerra%20Mundial%20Holocausto%20Sara%20Mart%C3%ADn.pdf). I’m thinking again of that paper after re-reading Zygmunt Bauman’s impressive Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). Also, because I see all over 21st century Europe…