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)).

  • IN AN INDEPENDENT SCOTLAND: CHARLES STROSS’S HALTING STATE

    Charles Stross is an English SF writer, born in Leeds (1964). I have no doubts that he is amongst the most interesting authors in the genre working today, and I am personally developing quite a taste for his dense, clever fiction, of which I’ve gone through four books so far (just the tip of the…

  • THE LIMITS OF THE COSMOPOLITAN NOVEL: MISSPELLING BARÇA…

    The cosmopolitan novel, according to Berthold Schoene’s eponymous volume (2009), opposes both the novel limited by the national territory (whether it is nationalist or not), and the post-colonial novel, which questions the very essence of the territorial from a critical position. The cosmopolitan writer has been freed by globalization to write about any theme located…

  • THE ANOMALY OF COPYRIGHT: THINKING OF FAN FICTION

    I’m congratulating myself for having given my students the chance to teach me –about fan fiction. I know about this phenomenon academically, meaning that I’ve read academic work on it. I’m not, however, a reader or a writer and, so, I delegated the task of instructing my Harry Potter class on the subject to those…

  • A CALCULATING WOMAN: PLANNING NEXT YEAR’S SCHEDULE

    One of the main tasks I must fulfil as BA Coordinator is planning the schedule for next year. Calculations used to be simple: 1 credit was the equivalent of 10 teaching hours and, so, a full time, tenured teacher was supposed to teach 24 credits, 240 hours. My contract specifies that I work 37,5 hours…

  • THE WAND CHOOSES THE WITCH: A STORY FOR POTTERHEADS

    If you’re not a Potterhead and if you find the idea of buying movie-related merchandise absurd, you will find what I’m going to narrate here simply silly. If you are a Potterhead, I’m sure you will love it… When I started teaching the Harry Potter elective and about two thirds of my class declared they…