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)).

  • A CONFERENCE: KILLING YOUR OWN PAPER

    I’m back from a conference, as usual with mixed feelings. Taking a break from admin work and students to focus on sharing ideas with academic peers is always refreshing, much more so when each day ends with dinner in good company and in a beautiful town, as was the case. Yet, inevitably I wonder why…

  • SCATTERED THOUGHTS ABOUT READING (AND E-READING)

    I finally got an e-book reader three weeks ago (um, yes, a Kindle Touch). It’s taken me a long time to choose one basically because I find the screens which e-book readers are equipped with too small in all cases. I guess the idea is that their overall size reproduces that of a smallish paperback…

  • TERRY AND CHARLIE: THE (VICTORIAN) CONNECTION SURFACES

    I must thank my PhD supervisor in Scotland, Prof. David Punter, for inviting me to overcome my prejudice against the colourful covers of Terry Pratchett’s novels and kicking me head first into the Discworld. 17 years and 39 novels later I can only say ‘thank you, thank you, thank you…’ for so much literary pleasure.…

  • ON PLAGIARISING, AGAIN, WITH SOME RECENT ANECDOTES (AND A PAIR OF LOUBOUTINS)

    Possibly, each anecdote deserves a separate entry but since they seem to be interconnected somehow, here they are together. I show a student where the plagiarised sentence she’s used comes from (a website) and she claims not to be aware of having copied –her defence is that the complete sentence stayed in her mind like…

  • IN MEMORIAM FÉLIX ERNESTO CHÁVEZ: AT A LOSS FOR WORDS

    Today we have learned that our dear colleague Félix Ernesto Chávez, a member of our research group ‘Body and Textuality,’ was brutally murdered last Monday in the course of a burglary in México DC. Félix had arrived just two weeks ago to teach a course at UNAM and was staying with relatives. A man who…