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)).

  • CLASS ETIQUETTE: RESPECT FOR THE TEACHER AT WORK (PERDONEU PERÒ ALGÚ HO HAVIA DE DIR…)

    One of my first year students eats during my class and I scold her publicly. I tell her this is rude, she should have had breakfast before 8:40. The class goes well but I must stop now and then to ask for silence. I have two clever-looking students who oscillate non-stop between chattering like old…

  • THE PLAGIARISING MINISTER

    Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg, the German Defence minister in Angela Merkel’s Government, has finally resigned. The reason? The newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung has made it public that Zu Guttenberg had plagiarised part of his doctoral dissertation: a staggering 20% of its 475 pages. Zu Guttenberg, a very popular politician, has taken his time to resign, as…

  • THE HEN! THE HEN!: AN HOMAGE TO THE LITLLE STORYTELLER ON THE TRAIN

    I’d run out of reading matter a few stops from my station, which is annoying, when a hassled thirty-something mum got on, dragging a feisty six-year-old and holding a crying, twisting, screaming two-year-old. They sat opposite me. For some puzzling reason, the baby was shouting at the top of her lungs for ‘The hen! The…

  • MORE ON MONEY: RESEARCHING THEATRE

    I invite to my Contemporary British Theatre class Prof. Mireia Aragay and Prof. Enric Monforte of the University of Barcelona, two of the best Spanish specialists in the field and co-authors of the excellent collection of interviews with directors, playwrights, critics and academics, British Theatre of the 1990s (Palgrave, 2007) I interview them with interventions…

  • THE COST OF DOING RESEARCH: A FEW FIGURES

    Happily for me, I’ve been commissioned a short book on heterosexuality for the collection ‘Los textos del cuerpo’ (EDIUOC) that the research group I belong to (‘Body and Textuality’, coordinated by Dr. Meri Torras) has been publishing since 2009. I’m now at the stage of putting together a bibliography… and making decisions about how much…