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)).

  • IF I WERE CHARLOTTE DICKENS… (HOW I’D REWRITE OLIVER TWIST)

    I don’t particularly favour the fashionable type of novel that attempts to update a classic by adding to it (the sequel to Pride and Prejudice by Emma Tennant, Pemberley), by paying homage (Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip), or by radically rewriting it (Ben Winters’s Android Karenina). If you want to tell a story, find your own…

  • PRETEND TEACHING: THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM FROM THE TEACHER’S PERSPECTIVE

    My ill-smelling classroom, now bearably hot as early Autumn temperatures have started falling slowly, has, as I have previously mentioned, no platform. As I wait for that to be built, from my unhigh-heeled perspective I see a very compact sea of 50-odd faces crowning young, restless bodies sitting too close for comfort. Like all teachers,…

  • PEOPLE WHO PASS THROUGH OUR CLASSROOMS: A SUCCESSFUL EX-STUDENT (ABOUT ELS AMICS DE LES ARTS)

    As a teacher I must say that one of the greatest satisfactions in seeing ex-students succeed professionally. Of course, ex-students who succeed in one’s own academic professional field elicit a little (or much…) envy, but that is truly fine: a healthy reminder of one’s limitations and even mediocrity, to which honest teachers must always be…

  • BITTERSWEET: THE FIRST BLOGGING YEAR…

    Yes, a year ago yesterday I posted my first entry (or did I enter my first post?, the semantics are unclear to me). 93 posts or entries later, I’m still here, which comes as a surprise to me, with enough energy, I believe, to go on for another year at least. Or, rather, it’s not…

  • A FEW THOUGHTS ON SF (AFTER A PHD DISSERTATION)

    One of my doctoral students, Rafael Miranda, has just passed his viva (or ‘defensa’) after submitting a brilliant doctoral dissertation on cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk. I am personally VERY proud to have helped him make such an interesting contribution to the field of Science-Fiction Studies. Particularly because that field is so tiny in Spanish English Studies…