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)).

  • THE LAYERS OF THE CONTEMPORARY

    I’m writing today in the hopes of better developing an idea I didn’t have time to expand on in class yesterday. I have been thinking about the meaning of the ‘contemporary’, both in the sense of how we consume books and which layers (I will explain) compose the totality of books at our disposal.            …

  • LAS CAPAS DE LO CONTEMPORÁNEO

    Escribo hoy con la esperanza de explicar mejor una idea que no tuve tiempo de desarrollar en clase ayer. He estado pensando en el significado de lo ‘contemporáneo’, tanto en el sentido de cómo consumimos libros como en qué capas (como explicaré) componen la totalidad de los libros a nuestra disposición.             La forma en…

  • HOW BOOK REVIEWS WORK: SOME EXAMPLES

    It turns out I have published 30 reviews, all of them of academic books, and I have two more about to be issued, which amounts more or less to one per year on average in the 33 years I have been an academic.             For me, the most memorable for me is, no doubt, my…

  • CÓMO FUNCIONAN LAS RESEÑAS DE LIBROS: ALGUNOS EJEMPLOS

    Resulta que he publicado 30 reseñas, todas ellas de libros académicos, y tengo dos más a punto de ser publicadas, lo que equivale a más o menos una por año de promedio en los 33 años que llevo siendo profesora. Para mí, la más memorable es, sin duda, mi reseña de Alternative Masculinities in Feminist…

  • RECOMENDATIONS AND REVIEWS: IMPORTANT DIFFERENCES

    I have finally started teaching my new subject Contemporary Literature in English after months of preparation and this is my first post directly connected to the issues raised in class. The subject, as I explained to the students, has two main purposes: familiarizing them with the most relevant fiction and non-fiction published between 1990 and…