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)).

  • RUNNING IN CIRCLES?: ONLINE TEACHING AT UOC

    Last Saturday I attended a seminar on the use of up-to-date computer technologies at my other university, the online Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. I’ve been teaching an ‘Introduction to English Literature’ for undergrads, compulsory for the degrees in ‘Humanities’ and ‘Language and Literature’, since 1998; it’s currently the 27th semester I do so. And I…

  • GENDER PEDAGOGIES, AND THE LIMITS OF MATERIAL VIOLENCE

    Yesterday (17-X) I presented my little book Desafíos a la Heterosexualidad Obligatoria, together with Miquel Missé, author of Transsexualitats: Altres Mirades Possibles and Gerard Coll-Planas, author of La Carn i la Metàfora: Una Reflexió sobre el Cos a la Teoria Queer. At one point of the lively ensuing dialogue, we were asked about the resistance…

  • ‘PROUD OF WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW’: THE REALM OF STUPIDITY

    At the end of a rainy afternoon I watch the 2003 documentary Stupidity (on YouTube). It’s not very good but at least the producers are brave enough to address the question of why stupidity is so popular in our days (much more so when the documentary was filmed, during Bush jr.’s first mandate). The key…

  • ELAINE SHOWALTER’S JOYS OF TEACHING LITERATURE

    Although I try to take regularly some of the teacher-training courses offered by my university, I find them, and the academic literature on higher-education teaching, generally too disconnected from my specific needs as a second-language teacher of Literature. The same applies to the bibliography on using Literature to teach English, which is not at all…

  • MORE ABUSED WOMEN… IN NOVELS BY MEN

    An MA student, Rubén, asks me to supervise his dissertation on Richard Yates’s 1961 novel Revolutionary Road –a novel I promised myself not to touch ever after seeing the film adaptation (because of its very ugly plot). Yet, what can I do? I like his proposal to consider 1950s masculinity and so… I must read…