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)).

  • ELSA’S DRESS AND GIRL POWER: WHAT I MISSED ABOUT FROZEN

    On 5 January this year I published here a post on a new Swedish system to rate films according to their feminist interest. In this post I mentioned in passing Frozen, noting that, although this Disney film exalts sisterly love, after seeing it my two Madrid nieces didn’t hug each other but remained “mesmerised,” poor…

  • OUTSMARTING CERVANTES: ARTURO PÉREZ REVERTE’S EDITION OF EL QUIJOTE

    Recently, I went to Laie in search of a copy of Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Platero y yo (1914) for my nine-year-old niece. I asked for an edition aimed at children, meaning illustrated, and I was offered instead an adapted edition. Scandalized that someone had dared touch the original, I bought her a beautiful edition commemorating…

  • TALK-STARVED, THE SEQUEL: TELLC, A MODEST CONTRIBUTION TO DEPARTMENT LIFE

    Two years ago, on 14 December 2014, the teaching innovation group I belonged to, “Between the Lines: Comprehensive Reading of Literary Texts in a Foreign Language” (coordinated by Andrew Monnickendam, and financed by Catalan agency AGAUR), held a one-day seminar to discuss how to teach Literature students about the function of the narrator. You may…

  • TALK-STARVED: A MODEST CONTRIBUTION TO ACADEMIC VOCABULARY

    A close friend tells me that the recent three-day conference on Modernism that he has co-organised worked very nicely. It was not, he tells me, necessary to divide the participants in simultaneous panels and this greatly contributed to raising the level of discussion. I can very well imagine! The whole event was in the end,…

  • GRAPPLING WITH BODY GOTHIC: THE LIMITS OF (MY) TOLERANCE

    I spent a rich afternoon yesterday reviewing Xavier Aldana Reyes’s excellent volume Body Gothic: Corporal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014). As happens, despite the 2,000 words I wrote, I’m not done yet; there’s still a matter to address: the limits of my own tolerance to the shocking…