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)).
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NETWORKING: BEYOND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN WORLD?
[The last two weeks have been too hectic for me to keep up the pace of regular posting here. Yes, teaching is over but not marking, or BA and MA examining boards. Bureaucracy is, well, eating me alive. Every time friends or relatives ask me whether I’m already on holiday I go ballistic…] Two very…
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UNIVERSITY TEACHERS WHO DON’T DO RESEARCH (SO, WHAT DO THEY DO?)
A pleased colleague tells me he’s been awarded the fifth ‘sexenio’, which means that his last personal research assessment exercise was positive and that he has validated by now, before the corresponding Ministry’s agency, 30 years of research. He tells me that this fifth exercise is valid for the rest of his professional life and…
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ATTACKING ACADEMESE IN THE HUMANITIES: THE HARD SF VIEW (ON GREG EGAN’S TERANESIA)
Reading the SF novel Teranesia (1999) by Australian novelist Greg Egan, I’m surprised to find an anti-academese critique embedded in a key subplot. The protagonist Prabir, a teenager, and his younger sister Madhusree lose their parents in the first segment of the book. The couple, Indian scientists doing research on a mysterious butterfly in a…
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GIVING ADVICE ON ACADEMIC CAREERS: AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK
In the last month I have given advice to three students who’d like to pursue an academic career and, to be honest, I didn’t know what to tell them. The easiest part is describing the mechanics of doctoral programmes and the accreditation system. The hardest part is assessing for them their chances to ever get…
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FANTASIZING ALTERNATIVE FATHER FIGURES: THE WAY, WAY BACK
Just three posts ago I wrote about reviewing in websites like Amazon or IMBD. Today I’m opening this post with my eyebrows raised because the IMDB reviews I’ve just been reading for a film I enjoyed last night (Nat Faxon & Jim Rash’s The Way, Way Back, 2013) seem to describe ten different films. The…