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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A VINDICATION OF AUNTS… (READING THE HARRY POTTER SERIES)
I have been VERY busy finishing the edition of a collective volume which gathers together my students’ essays on their experience of reading the Harry Potter series. This volume is called Addictive and Wonderful, a phrase borrowed from the essay in it by Marta Canals, and will hopefully be available on the internet soon. I’m…
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A (CONFUSED) WORD ABOUT NON-FICTION (AND ROBERTO SAVIANO’S ZEROZEROZERO)
Almost exactly two years ago I published a post titled “The other books: The problem of non-fiction”. I started by worrying about whether it is really true that as readers age the novel loses its charm and the other prose books gain ground in our preferences as readers. As I approach my 48th birthday I…
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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…
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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…
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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…