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)).

  • READING ‘AVERAGE’ BOOKS (I): RAFAEL YGLESIAS’S A HAPPY MARRIAGE

    In this and the following entry I’d like to write about two very different books I’ve been reading for academic purposes, in one case connected with teaching and in the other with the search for a topic linked to a conference. You’ll see why. I chose Rafael Yglesias’s novel A Happy Marriage (2009) for my…

  • THE ART OF ENTERTAINING: EGOS TEATRE’S ELS CRIMS DE LORD ARTHUR SAVILLE

    This semester we’re awarding our Victorian Literature students extra points for attending a performance of either Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece La importància de ser Frank (see related posting in October), or Egos Teatre’s production of Els crims de Lord Arthur Saville, a musical based on Wilde’s short story. Ironically, Wilde’s classy and classic comedy was offered…

  • READING ‘TRASH’: ON THE HEROINE’S LOSS OF DIGNITY

    As part of my MA course on ‘Postmodernities: New Sexualities/New Textualities,’ which deals with Gender Studies as it is easy to surmise, I decided to include a ‘chick lit’ novel. I needed something reasonably short and, ideally, about a woman who already has a candidate to be her Mr Right but who comes across the…

  • OSCAR AND BORIS: A FARFETCHED COMPARISON

    I was trying to get my students interested in Oscar Wilde’s peculiar position as a late Victorian celebrity avant la lettre, and before I really knew what I was saying I blurted out that his celebrity status then was not so different from that of Venezuelan import Boris Izaguirre today. That surely got their attention…

  • BACK FROM MARS: KIM STANLEY ROBINSON’S MARTIAN TRILOGY (ABOUT READING A VERY LONG TEXT… FOR PLEASURE?)

    It’s taken me a few months to go through the 2,000 pages that compose Robinson’s trilogy about the (hopefully) soon to come colonisation of Mars: Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1992) and Blue Mars (1996). At some point, particularly when the end of the Mars 500 experiment was announced (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_500), I thought that Mars…