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)).

  • A CHEEKY FILM: BATTLE LOS ANGELES (2011)

    Get Independence Day, Black Hawk Down, Cloverfield and a number of alien-slashing computer games and out of this heady cocktail comes Battle Los Angeles, one of the cheekiest pieces of US military propaganda you can ever imagine. The storyline, strikingly similar to that of Skyline, couldn’t be simpler: Los Angeles is invaded by an army…

  • ‘A SLIGHTLY SUPERIOR SPAIN’: THE FATE OF POST-IMPERIAL NATIONS

    In his excellent cultural history of sf, simply called Science Fiction (2005) Roger Luckhurst comments at one point on C.P. Snow’s The New Men (1954). This is a novel in which a dying nuclear physicist envisions a sad, decadent future for post-WWII Britain. Two things can happen, according to this Englishman: “the best is that…

  • THAT SINKING FEELING: READING DAVID GILMORE’S MISOGYNY: THE MALE MALADY

    David Gilmore is an American anthropologist who specialises in Spanish masculinism in recalcitrant local areas, which, I’m sure, is enough for several academic careers. Having puzzled over his volume Manhood in the Making (1991), which deals with the rites of passage devised by men around the world to access ‘proper’ masculinity, I embarked this summer…

  • A MATTER OF OPINION: ABOUT AMAZON READERS’ BOOK RANKINGS

    (It feels very nice to return to this blog after a much necessary three-week summer break, which, like all Literature teachers, I have spent chain-reading… Shouldn’t this count as work time??) Among my summer reading I have included Iain M. Banks’s last Culture novel Surface Detail (2010). He happens to be my favourite sf writer…

  • BRONTË’S THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL ON TV: WHY I WON’T SHOW IT IN CLASS

    Among the myriad things we, teachers, do in July one is (re-)reading the set texts for the coming academic year and, in some cases, seeing the corresponding film adaptation (on DVD, self-financed) to check whether it might be of use to complement the book (also self-financed). I personally enjoy very much doing research on film…