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)).

  • ON BOREDOM: DIFFERENT GENERATIONAL STRATEGIES

    Who or what is to blame for the idea that whoever dares speak in public must, above all, entertain? The adjective ‘boring’ has become absolutely pervasive in the classroom and, no doubt, a major enemy of learning. In recent days I have gone through so many situations connected with this that it is hard to…

  • 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,…