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)).

  • POSTMODERNISM IS DEAD, LONG LIVE POSTMODERNISM: SEEKING A NEW LABEL FOR THE NEW TIMES

    Today, I’m commenting on Alison Gibbons’ article in the Times Literary Supplement, “Postmodernism is dead. What comes next?” (12 June 2017, http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/postmodernism-dead-comes-next/?CMP=Sprkr-_-Editorial-_-TimesLiterarySupplement-_-ArtsandCulture-_-JustTextandlink-_-Statement-_-Unspecified-_-FBPAGE). There are many important questions about Postmodernism which nobody seems to agree on: 1) when did it begin: was it 1960s, 1980s, later even?; 2) is it already dead?; 3) when did Postmodernism…

  • ASEXUALITY REVISITED (WITH SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT LABELS)

    Two years ago I published a post with the title “And now for the asexuals… : Ceaseless labelling in Gender Studies” (15 March 2015). This was inspired by the draft of a chapter in a PhD dissertation, which I was asked to assess. Yesterday I had the pleasure of sitting on the board for the…

  • REVIEWING THE VAMPIRE: WHAT SEEMS TO BE AT STAKE

    This is an anecdote I have often told in class and to my tutorees. I was in a tutorial with my PhD supervisor in Scotland, Prof. David Punter. My topic was monstrosity in 1980s and 1990s fiction. I had reached that low point which all doctoral students hit when you realize that nobody cares about…

  • ON THE DECLINE OF CINEMA (WITH SOME MUSINGS ABOUT THE 1980s)

    This post is a mixed bag of ideas about cinema. Some are suggested by reading this weekend the Spanish version of Hadley Freeman’s pop essay Time of my Life (2015), a book about the pleasures of 1980s movies. Other ideas spring from the controversy at the Cannes Film Festival (which closed yesterday) on whether Netflix…

  • BLURRED LINES: TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE WRITERS OF THE PAST

    No, sorry, this is not a post about Robin Thicke’s catchy, appallingly sexist 2013 hit, which, by the way, turned out to be plagiarised (from a Marvin Gaye song). No: today I’m dealing with our difficulties to produce a clearly defined portrait of the writers of the pre-media past. By pre-media I mean the historical…