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)).

  • SCARY MONSTERS (AND SUPER CREEPS): REVISITING CHILDHOOD TERRORS – THE BETA CLOUD, AN EPISODE OF SPACE 1999

    Sorry about the unimaginative allusion in the title to David Bowie’s wonderful 1980s record (LP, not CD…). What else could I use to recall one of my main childhood terrors? Yes, I’m writing here today about memory and, particularly, about the childhood terrors that remain with us for decades, in this case consciously. Yet, at…

  • READ YOU LATER, IAIN M. BANKS! (LEARNING THE MEANING OF THE WORD ‘COMPLETIST’)

    Dear Iain, As I have narrated here, on the very same day you announced your imminent death of cancer, I had sent an abstract for a conference about your twelfth (and last!) SF novel, The Hydrogen Sonata. The conference is next October, the paper is written, and you were supposed to live until then. Unfortunately,…

  • MOVING BEYOND THE STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS: ARE WE READY?

    I’m writing this post in answer to Sophia McDougall’s juicy article for the New Statesman, “I hate Strong Female Characters” (15 August, http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/08/i-hate-strong-female-characters). Basically she complains that while male characters get pinned on them a variety of adjectives (see her list for Sherlock Holmes), female characters in recent audiovisual fiction “get to be Strong.” McDougall…

  • READING AND SEEING, SEEING AND READING: A NOTE ON DOCUMENTARIES

    I love documentaries. Not nature documentaries, whether they are of the cute, cheesy variety or of the ultra realistic kind –which, for some reason or other, always include grisly scenes of bigger animals killing smaller animals. I mean culture documentary films. My second dream job after university teacher, is ‘documentary film maker’. (Actually this is…

  • DAENERYS AND ALL THE REST: ON READING/SEEING GEORGE R.R. MARTIN’S A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE (UM, OR IS IT A GAME OF THRONES?)

    Last Christmas holiday I published a post on the Harry Potter series which has led to my teaching next academic year an elective subject on Rowling’s dark yarn. Having enjoyed season one of TV series A Game of Thrones, I told myself that perhaps soon it should be the turn for George R. R. Martin’s…