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)).

  • SHAME OF THE NATION: ON WATCHING EL SILENCIO DE OTROS

    It is habitual in scholarly work that a text illuminates another text quite by chance, in that phenomenon usually called serendipity. Reading the second edition of Sarah Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004, 2014) to fill in a serious gap in my list of books read, I have found myself considering in the light…

  • RESPECT THE TRANSLATOR!: AMANDA GORMAN AND THE INACCEPTABLE DISMISSAL OF HER CATALAN TRANSLATOR

    National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman (Los Angeles, 1988) became a world-wide celebrity two months ago, after her reading of her poem “The Hill We Climb” during President Joe Biden’s inauguration (on 6th January). I am not particularly interested in assessing her quality as a poet, which I find rather overvalued, but on criticizing the…

  • MEN AND MASCULINITY IN CINEMA: 103 BOOKS

    In case this might interest any scholars working on men and masculinity in cinema, here’s my bibliography of the field, from 1977 to 2020. The selection does not include many books on the filmographies in other languages than English, though there are some volumes that do deal with them and that are included here to…

  • GENDER AND SEX: RETHINKING LABELS IN VIEW OF NEW EVIDENCE

    A recent article in The Washington Post announced that “1 in 6 Gen Z adults are LGBT: And this number could continue to grow” (their original source is BedBible.com) Gen Zers are the persons born between 1997 and 2012 (or 2015 depending on the sources). They are, thus, between 6 and 24 years old, but…

  • LET ME COUNT THE BOOKS…: PIERRE BAYARD’S HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ

    Allow me to begin by venting my massive annoyance with the new platform which my university has chosen to keep track of our academic activities, as if ORCID, Academia.edu, and my own webpage were not enough. I have spent two and a half complete working days trying to make sense of its user-unfriendly approach to…