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)).

  • JEREMY PAXMAN’S THE VICTORIANS: THE VICTORY OF THE PHILISTINES?

    A dear friend gave me as a present Jeremy Paxman’s book The Victorians: Britain through the Paintings of the Age (2009), a very refreshing volume which is by no means a history of Victorian painting but a look at the Victorian age through its pictorial obsessions. The volume, it turns out, is a tie-in of…

  • COUPLE-RELATED VIOLENCE: THE MATTER OF SEMANTICS

    I’ve been mulling this matter over since attending CIME 2011 last week. In that conference the expressions ‘domestic violence,’ ‘sexist violence,’ ‘gendered or gender-related violence’ and ‘male chauvinist violence’ were bandied about without much agreement on what this all-pervading type of violence should be called. I would certainly not call it a ‘phenomenon,’ as the…

  • AMONG MEN…: A CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH AND ACTIVISM ABOUT MASCULINITIES

    I’ve been looking forward to writing this blog entry for some time, as my expectations for CIME 2011, the Ibero-American Conference on Masculinities and Equity, were high. They have been fulfilled in that, to my great pleasure and relief, I’ve learned that there are many men fighting patriarchy with all their might (see www.homesigualitaris.cat for…

  • POWER POINTLESS: TEACHING LITERATURE… BY READING

    After one month lecturing in my computer-less classroom, I’ve got used to it and even find myself enjoying very much the absence of a screen. I’ve gone back in time, no doubt, to offer that kind of old-fashioned type of Literature teaching based on massive doses of (my) reading aloud. Dickens helps very much in…

  • HOW IT FEELS TO BE PRIVILEGED AT THE END OF THE MONTH

    I have plenty of work to do today but I feel too depressed to start without letting steam out here first. This depression stems from hearing news the whole week through about the pay cuts that our fellow civil servants, the doctors employed by the Institut Català de la Salut, are being forced to accept.…