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)).

  • AMONG MEN…: A CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH AND ACTIVISM ABOUT MASCULINITIES

    I’ve been looking forward to writing this blog entry for some time, as my expectations for CIME 2011, the Ibero-American Conference on Masculinities and Equity, were high. They have been fulfilled in that, to my great pleasure and relief, I’ve learned that there are many men fighting patriarchy with all their might (see www.homesigualitaris.cat for…

  • POWER POINTLESS: TEACHING LITERATURE… BY READING

    After one month lecturing in my computer-less classroom, I’ve got used to it and even find myself enjoying very much the absence of a screen. I’ve gone back in time, no doubt, to offer that kind of old-fashioned type of Literature teaching based on massive doses of (my) reading aloud. Dickens helps very much in…

  • HOW IT FEELS TO BE PRIVILEGED AT THE END OF THE MONTH

    I have plenty of work to do today but I feel too depressed to start without letting steam out here first. This depression stems from hearing news the whole week through about the pay cuts that our fellow civil servants, the doctors employed by the Institut Català de la Salut, are being forced to accept.…

  • IF I WERE CHARLOTTE DICKENS… (HOW I’D REWRITE OLIVER TWIST)

    I don’t particularly favour the fashionable type of novel that attempts to update a classic by adding to it (the sequel to Pride and Prejudice by Emma Tennant, Pemberley), by paying homage (Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip), or by radically rewriting it (Ben Winters’s Android Karenina). If you want to tell a story, find your own…

  • PRETEND TEACHING: THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM FROM THE TEACHER’S PERSPECTIVE

    My ill-smelling classroom, now bearably hot as early Autumn temperatures have started falling slowly, has, as I have previously mentioned, no platform. As I wait for that to be built, from my unhigh-heeled perspective I see a very compact sea of 50-odd faces crowning young, restless bodies sitting too close for comfort. Like all teachers,…