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)).

  • STATISTIC IMPOSSIBILITIES (WHY OUR COMMON GROUND IS GONE)

    “What happened to essential books?,” Rick Gekoski wonders, recalling with candid nostalgia an ideal 1974 when everyone had read the 21 books in his list, at least everyone he knew at Oxford (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/oct/22/essential-books, thanks to Laura Gimeno for the link). What’s happened is statistics, for now there’s so much of everything and so many…

  • READING DICKENS… ALOUD

    As anyone who enjoys reading Dickens knows, he had a very active interest in theatre to the point of staging amateur theatricals in his own home and taking part in them as an actor (that is how he met Ellen Ternan). His passion for drama is more than obvious in the dialogue of his novels,…

  • THAT SUBVERSIVE CANON… OR DOING MARGINAL RESEARCH ON 19TH CENTURY US FICTION

    Recently, I spoke with a doctoral student working for her PhD dissertation on Herman Melville’s more neglected texts. To my surprise, she complained that the field of American Studies in Spain is saturated with research on 20th century and contemporary texts with a strong racial and ethnic component. This is why, in her view, 19th…

  • ON FALLEN IDOLS (AND MR. CHARLES DICKENS)

    I’ve started teaching Great Expectations and, as our times will have it, I have used a PowerPoint presentation to accompany a brief introduction to the life and works of Mr. Charles Dickens. In the course of searching for pictures that might make this write out of the remote Victorian past more real for them, I…

  • FASTER, FASTER… (DO DIGITAL RESOURCES MAKE LITERARY RESEARCH EASIER?)

    This issue of whether the internet and the related digital resources make literary research faster comes up in conversation with our new MA students and with a doctoral student, now finishing her dissertation. Actually, I seem to have pretty much forgotten what it was like to do research before the internet although I wrote my…