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)).

  • DEATH OF THE NOVEL, DEATH OF THE READER: A DEBATE (WITH AIs)

    This post is inspired by two articles about novelists considering whether the novel is in its dying throes. The interview by Vicent Bosch of Guillem López (Castelló, 1975) for JotDown bears the heading “No creo que la novela sobreviva medio siglo” (https://www.jotdown.es/2018/06/guillem-lopez-no-creo-que-la-novela-sobreviva-medio-siglo-la-literatura-si-pero-sera-otra-cosa-tal-vez-un-videojuego/). The Guardian’s article about the BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking talk by novelist…

  • ANATOMY OF THE BOND GIRL: THE CASE OF SOLITAIRE

    In one of those bouts of curiosity that may overpower even the most cautious reader, I have gone through the twelve James Bond novels by Ian Fleming (there are two more books, with short fiction, and other novels by living authors). I am by no means a Bond fan but, like many others who don’t…

  • KATHARINE BURDEKIN’S SWASTIKA NIGHT IN THE TIMES OF THE HANDMAID’S TALE: A WARNING ABOUT PATRIARCHAL ENSLAVEMENT

    I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) many years ago before seeing the unfairly neglected film adaptation with the late Natasha Richardson as Offred, directed in 1990 by Volker Schlöndorff and written by none other than Nobel Prize award-winner Harold Pinter. I have not seen, thank you very much, the ongoing HBO series, now…

  • AN EXTREMELY GUILTY PLEASURE: THE GREATEST SHOWMAN I recall from my childhood years how annoyed my father grew every time there was a musical film on TV and the actors burst out singing. I am confused to this day about whether the songs were also dubbed or left in the original English version (with no…

  • A PERSISTENT BUNCH: DOCTORAL STUDENTS AGAINST THE WORLD

    Yesterday we spent our working day going through the yearly interviews with our doctoral candidates–it seems, then, a good moment to ponder the use of doctoral programmes. To begin with, a reminder: only a very small minority of the individuals who practice medicine are properly speaking ‘doctors’; most just have a degree (a BA) in…