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 from https://ddd.uab.cat/record/116328, 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)).

  • TRUE DETECTIVES AND SERIAL KILLERS (BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC): DEHUMANISED GIRLS AND MALE CLICHÉS

    This week I have watched the US series True Detective (9 episodes, 2014) and have read book 19 in Ian Rankin’s series about Edinburgh cop John Rebus, Standing in Another Man’s Grave (2012). Blame a nasty cold for my sluggish mind but at points the missing girls in Nic Pizzolato’s screenplay would get mixed with…

  • (GENDERED) WORLD WAR III: HOPING IT NEVER HAPPENS

    I was just considering whether to recycle a truncated debate in class last week for this post, when an email message brought me notice of a lecture by the illustrious Prof. Paul Collier, an economist from the Blavatnik School at Oxford University (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~econpco/). His title: “Is the world approaching war again?” This chimes in with…

  • ALTERNATIVE MASCULINITIES (IN CLASS)

    Yesterday I had the unusual pleasure of basing my lecture on a collective volume just issued, in which I participate: Àngels Carabí & Josep Maria Armengol’s (eds.) Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). Serendipity dictated the coincidence of publication and lecture, and I very much enjoyed this happy accident. The topic of…

  • THE NEW BA (‘GRADO’) REFORM: NO WAY TO EDUCATE ANYONE…

    This morning I was helping my 9-year-old niece to do her homework: a set of terminally boring exercises on how to use punctuation, designed to make any child hate commas and semi-colons for life. The cynical author had the gall of writing an exercise with the wording “Write an exclamatory sentence expressing how you feel…

  • STEVE MCQUEEN: THE GUYS’ GUY (WHAT ABOUT THE GALS?)

    You may have heard that millions of I-Phone users were very much annoyed with Apple when they discovered that the new U2 album had been downloaded onto their smartphones without their permission. What you might not know is that the youngest I-Phone-addicts flooded Twitter with complaints beginning ‘who the f*** are U2?’ I wonder whether…