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)).

  • A GREAT DOUBLE BILL ON THE LIVES OF YOUNG GIRLS: CUTIES AND EIGHTH GRADE

    You may have heard already of Cuties (original title Mignonnes), the debut feature film by French-Senegalese director Maïmouna Doucouré (b. 1985) author also of the screenplay. Her film, partly based on her own childhood experiences, narrates a turning point in the life of eleven-year-old Amy, a young girl with the same migrant ethnic background as…

  • DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINES: TEACHING IN THE TIMES OF COVID-19

    My good friend Brian Baker (@SciFiBaker) tweeted yesterday: “Hands up who’s tried, through classroom technology failures and ‘dual mode delivery’, to teach online students down your phone at the same time as trying to organise discussion with other students in the classroom? Next time I’ll take a unicycle with me as well”. And do handstands……

  • NEW BOOK!: REPRESENTATIONS OF MASCULINITY IN LITERATURE AND FILM – FOCUS ON MEN

    Last March I published the post “How Entitlement and Villainy Connect” (https://blogs.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/2020/03/03/how-entitlement-and-villainy-connect-as-i-explain-in-masculinity-and-patriarchal-villainy-from-hitler-to-voldemort/) to publicise my first monograph in English Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in British Fiction: From Hitler to Voldemort (Routledge, 2019). Now is the turn to launch my second book in English, Representations of Masculinity in Literature and Film: Focus on Men (http://www.cambridgescholars.com/representations-of-masculinity-in-literature-and-film). Both…

  • THE ROLE OF ADMIRATION IN LOVE: A FEW THOUGHTS

    More on gender today, this time inspired by my reading of two extremely different volumes: Núria Gómez Gabriel and Estela Ortiz’s Love Me, Tinder: Una Mirada Crítica a lo que Ellos Ofrecen (2020) and Antonio Bolinche’s El Síndrome de las Supermujeres (2020). Gómez Gabriel and Ortiz dissect with verve but rather superficially men’s written self-presentations…

  • BOYS, GIRLS, AND SEX: STATE OF THE MATTER

    American journalist Peggy Orenstein became a much sought-after expert on girls before becoming herself a mother, at which point she realized that theory hardly ever matches practice. Her book Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (2012) describes the discomfiture caused by her inability to steer her daughter…