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)).

  • RECONSIDERING JEKYLL AND HYDE ONCE MORE: ON PERSONALITY DISSOCIATION

    This is the third post I write here on Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, which shows that a masterpiece is that kind of text that delivers something new every time the reader approaches it. In preparation for my classes, I read Nancy Gish’s essay “Jekyll and Hyde: The Pathology of…

  • WHAT WE TEACH, WHAT WE DON’T TEACH: SOME THOUGHTS (AND A NEW COLLABORATION)

    I start here a little experiment: a series of, in principle, 5 collaborations with Cristina García Leitón, a student taking a combined BA in Spanish and English. Cristina runs her own blog, http://palabrascomosouvenir.blogspot.com.es/, and when I saw that she has a little subsection called ‘Aventuras y desventuras de una filóloga en proceso’ (within her Literature…

  • SHORT BURSTS OF THINKING (OR WHY WRITING A BLOG MAKES SENSE)

    I had an interesting conversation with a philosopher friend who, in the last few years, has been concentrating his teaching in one semester and spending the other in the USA. He has married an American woman and since re-location is not an option for either, given the stage their careers are at, he has made…

  • THE WORK I’VE TAUGHT MOST OFTEN: KAZUO ISHIGURO’S THE REMAINS OF THE DAY (AND STEREOTYPES)

    I haven’t been able to find a better title for this post possibly because this is it: I want to write about the work I have taught most often throughout my 21 years as a university teacher. It used to be Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights until I took a break from it to teach Anne…

  • LET’S SUBLIME: A POLITICAL READING FOR THE HYDROGEN SONATA

    I have devoured this week Iain M. Banks’s new Culture novel The Hydrogen Sonata (see http://www.iain-banks.net/). As I wrote last year in the post on Surface Detail, I hesitate to recommend his novels either as a mainstream or as an sf novelist for I know this is an acquired taste. I read complaints in Amazon.co.uk…