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)).

  • A FAST AGEING CULTURE: (NEW) PROBLEMS IN THE STUDY OF POPULAR FICTIONS

    This summer I am giving myself a crash course in ballet because I don’t think there is a bigger pleasure than discovering a whole exciting field one knows nothing about. Two posts ago, I already commented on the lack of sufficient introductory texts and the role of men as ‘male ballerinas’ (this is a tag…

  • INDOCTRINATING YOUNG MEN: IN SEARCH OF IDEALS

    I’m writing this post in the aftermath of the terrible Barcelona attack on 17 August, in which 13 persons were killed by a young man driving a van into the crowded Rambles, leaving 180 others injured. The van driver, 22-year-old Younes Abouyaaqoub, is still at large. Later, in the early hours of 18 August, the…

  • KINGS OF DANCE, MEN IN BALLET: FROM LOUIS XIV TO SERGEI POLUNIN

    Many complain that the most neglected area in our cultural education is music. I disagree: I believe it is dance, and ballet in particular. The current syllabus for secondary education in Catalonia includes a course called ‘History of music and dance’ (see http://xtec.gencat.cat/web/.content/alfresco/d/d/workspace/SpacesStore/0084/cc151bd5-caee-4c3d-8e35-a7053619c91e/historia_musica_dansa.pdf), which seems an improvement in relation to the total absence of these…

  • RETHINKING THE POSTCOLONIAL: VANDANA SINGH, INDIAN SF WRITER

    My colleague Felicity Hand is organizing yet another exciting conference, this time on India. Having learned much about Postcolonialism from previous similar events, I have submitted a proposal (see http://jornades.uab.cat/aeeii2017/en, also Felicity’s research group Ratnakara http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/ratnakara/). I decided to focus my paper on science fiction, a genre with a very rich history in India in…

  • TRYING TO CATCH UP…: A BOOK ON RECENT (SCOTTISH) LITERATURE

    I have given myself the task of checking my university library’s catalogue and select a variety of volumes for summer reading, in an attempt to catch up with the novelties in the areas I’m interested in. The function of journals used to be exactly that: keeping researchers informed about the latest advances in a given…