With Laura Vivanco, of Teach Me Tonight.
Before launching in to Laura’s answers, I wanted to say something about Laura and about Teach Me Tonight, the only (as far as I know) group blog dedicated to academic study of popular romance.
As Laura points out below, Eric Selinger was actually the original motivating force behind TMT, and Laura shares TMT duties with several talented writers and academics. I asked Laura to fill out the RRR Q.E. because TMT was one of the first blogs I found when I discovered romance and because she was one of the very first to comment here. Laura has provided invaluable commentary and email support to me thoughout this venture. Whenever I say that comments make this blog, Laura is one of the first people who springs to mind.
I think it is very difficult to do what Laura, Eric, Sarah Frantz and the folks at TMT are doing. Academia is inherently very conservative. In the normal course of events, the grad student is taken under the wing of an established academic in her department, and writes a dissertation that makes a modest novel contribution to the field, often involving a heavy reliance on said thesis director’s published work and research paradigm. The thesis director, and grad programs generally, are interested in placing their PhD students in an impossibly competitive market (we typically have 200 qualified –terminal degree holding – applicants per position in my department, and I am not exactly at Harvard). So, for lots of reasons, PhD students tend not to be encouraged to pursue very radical research programs.
Then they get (if lucky) tenure track jobs, and while they are in what we call the probationary (pre-tenure) period, and up through the (usually 6th) tenure year, they are evaluated by senior colleagues, first in their home department, and then by tenured peer reviewers around the country (and world). Again, in this situation, what gets rewarded is working on a recognizable area and set of problems and publishing your results in peer reviewed journals with established reputations. It is difficult to get a paper published on a topic that people in your field do not recognize as worthy of study, and publish you must (for good reason). It is also difficult to explain to senior colleagues why a brand new journal in a newish format (digital) should count as much as the more traditional venues they know well. Tenure is up or out, and my friends who have been denied tenure have had decidedly poor prospects after their rejections. Why take the risk?
Who would study contemporary popular romance? Three possible, and overlapping groups (at least): literature scholars, cultural studies scholars, and feminist scholars. None of these groups has been, I would guess, a particularly welcoming field in which to conduct modern romance research, for a host of reasons, many of which I now think –thanks to TMT – are unpersuasive in the extreme. Suffice to say that all of the derision heaped on popular romance by the Man or Woman On the Street is there, for all the reasons with which you, dear reader, are familiar (it is mass produced and consumed pop culture, it is for women and by women, it is often sexually explicit, etc.) but instead of just worrying about how to respond to an ignorant question on the subway, romance scholars may have to worry about losing their chances at getting a job or keeping it.
But the folks at TMT are helping to change all of that.
The work that they are doing is, in my mind, just as admirable, or even more so, than getting published in the top journals. They are damning the torpedoes, breaking new ground, changing minds, encouraging and supporting young scholars and grad students, cajoling old timers to switch gears (I mean, I heard a story that one scholar put aside her half finished paper on deactivating implanted cardiac devices at the end of life just so she could write a paper on Sookie Stackhouse! That’s crazy talk!), starting up a new journal and organization, forging key connections with the industry, and probably lots of other initiatives of which I am not even aware.
So, by way of introducing Laura’s answers, I wanted to say thank you to Laura, Eric, Sarah and the crew at TMT for what they are doing, what they have done, and the amazing things they have yet to do.
1. What motivated you to start your blog?
I didn’t start Teach Me Tonight: Eric Selinger did. You’d really have to ask him for his reasons. I joined in because it seemed to me that blogging would be a good way to (a) counter the idea that romance novels are escapist fluff which can never be taken seriously and (b) show that not all academics are hostile to the romance genre.
2. Are those still the reasons you blog?
Yes, but in addition I discovered that blogging can be a very helpful way to work through ideas and to get input from the blog’s readers, who are very knowledgeable about the genre. Some of the posts are news items and calls for papers, but when I write an essay-type post it can feel like presenting a paper to a seminar group, and then awaiting the responses of the audience. It can be a very productive, interactive process.
3. How has TMT changed since you began writing for it?
It’s a group blog, and I can’t speak for the others, but I think we have more items about academic conferences, calls for papers etc. That’s an indication of the increasing academic interest in the genre. The forthcoming launch of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies will no doubt affect the blog too. In the words of Sarah Frantz,
The journal, as currently envisioned, will be an online, blind
peer-reviewed, open access journal, available to anyone to read
[...]. It will evaluate, analyze, and otherwise discuss all
forms of popular romance, not just romance novels. This could be
popular romance in music, film, soap operas, celebrity life,
art, or commercials/advertising–popular romance writ large. The
journal will consist of academic articles, reviews of academic
books on popular romance, as well as academic reviews of popular
romance. I would like to be able to have comments after each
article, so there can be conversations about the ideas in the
articles as they’re posted.
4. If you had to describe your blog to someone with an incredibly short attention span, how would you do it? (One word or fewer, please).
“Boring.” I find it fascinating, of course, but it’s not really a blog that I can imagine would be interesting to someone with “an incredibly short attention span,” although we do try to include pictures and YouTube clips in many of our posts.
5. If you could only read one romance blog (other than your own, chica — I am one step ahead of your ego!) for a week on a desert island which would it be?
[I'll start this answer for you: "This is so hard. There are so many great blogs. Blah Blah Blah." Now SPILL.]
Racy Romance Reviews, of course! And I’m not saying that to flatter you, Jessica. I enjoy the way you analyse so many of the books you review.
[See! I told you she was smart.]
6. Do you sometimes feel like blogging has taken over your life? And if not, what is the matter with you and why aren’t you more committed?
The point when I felt blogging had taken over my life was also the point when I realised that my posts were getting so long that perhaps it would be better to expand some of them into full-length academic essays. I hope to be involved with the Journal of Popular Romance Studies in one way or another, and because it will be open access and will be allowing comments after each article, I think it could in some ways be considered a rather more formal, more rigorously academic, version of the Teach MeTonight blog.
It’s a group blog, and as far as I know, we don’t have any official or unofficial long-term goals.
As far as I know, Teach Me Tonight is unique in being the oldest academic blog about the genre.
Different blogs and bloggers have different focuses and strengths. Some have a really high output and/or create a particular community atmosphere and/or have rigorous analysis of particular issues. It would be difficult to pick out just one thing to admire.
Since I don’t know how many readers any blog has, that’s a bit difficult to answer. In addition, I wouldn’t judge a blog’s success by the number of its readers. Some blogs may appeal to fewer people, but still be very enjoyable for those readers. I don’t write reviews, in part because I’m aware that people’s tastes differ, and something I love may not please others, so I’m equally hesitant to recommend just one blog or suggest it ought to appeal to large numbers of other readers.
11. How hot is your blog’s look? Choose your scale:
Vegetarian Rating scale: Scorching, Smoking, Glowing, Tingling, hot coffee, cup of tea (caffeinated), cup of tea (herbal), milk (tepid), O’Doul’s, ice water.
Carnivore Rating Scale: Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Denzel Washington, Nathan Fillion, Simon Baker, Zac Efron, Jonas Bros (all three), Jonas Bros (any one), Paul Giametti
Omnivore Rating scale: Christian Bale, Halle Berry, Hellboy, Charlize Theron, Doctor Manhattan, Daniel Radcliffe, Lady GaGa, Alf, iCarly, E.T.
Since I don’t want to objectify any actors, I’ll choose the vegetarian scale. TMT’s look is probably like a warm cup of milk. We did discuss ways to make it more exciting, but using the Blogger template was easier.
12. Kindly enter the Blog Stat Slut Box (you can’t see it, but you now have a truth telling digital lasso around your computer and cannot
lie) (although there is a loophole for exaggeration, hyperbole, and false modesty)
a. Number of times a day you check your stats (readers, multiply by 3 to get a more accurate number):
I used to check them very, very frequently but then I got started on some other work and recently I’ve been checking them only on days when someone’s put up a post.
I think at one point we were hovering around 150 hits per day, but it’s always fluctuated depending on how frequently we put up posts and whether or not one of the big blogs had linked to us, and presumably it’s also affected by how many people are reading the posts via a feed. I’m not sure how to check how many subscribers we have.
Sarah and Eric tend to be the TMT bloggers with big ambitions. Sarah’s the driving force behind the creation of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance and will be its first President, and Eric was the one who set up TMT and will be the Executive Editor of the JPRS.
They need to think about who their audience will be, and what they’d do and feel if the audience turned out not to be as big/small/respectful/responsive as the blogger would wish. It’s also worth thinking about how blogging fits in with life offline (blogging can be time-consuming), what colleagues, family members etc might feel about what’s written on the blog, and how likely they are to discover it.
Thank you , Laura!!
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#1 by Sarah Frantz on March 24, 2009 - 6:43 am
::blushes:: Thank you, Jessica and Laura. You’ve given me incentive (again–I keep needing it) to go out and do all the little fiddly things to get IASPR and JPRS off the ground. It was great hearing about TMT and the romance world from Laura’s perspective.
I’m lucky, Jessica, in that I’m at a very small teaching school on a 4/4 load that’s just happy if I’m publishing at all and doesn’t particularly care what I publish in. My original field is Romantic-era British women novelists (Austen and others), but my theoretical focus is feminist narratology and my thematic focus is the way female authors write their male characters, so it’s those that I’m bringing forward to my analysis of popular romance fiction. So I just got lucky and don’t see it as that much of a stretch. Eric though…!
#2 by Laura Vivanco on March 24, 2009 - 7:46 am
Thanks for asking me to visit, Jessica. I am now sunning myself in the warmth of your praise.
Unlike Sarah, my original field is medieval Spanish, and my thesis was on death, so yes, switching to romance scholarship been a bit of a change for me, though I’ve also had an article published (and another one that’s been due to be published for years) on the Spanish sentimental romance, which is a very, very tiny genre dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It’s not very similar to the modern romance genre, for a number of reasons, including the fact that the heroes and heroines often end up dead.
Unlike all my fellow bloggers at TMT, I’m what’s sometimes called an “independent scholar.” I’m not affiliated to, or employed by, a university, so there’s no pressure on me to produce any particular kind of work. I also don’t need “to worry about losing [my] chances at getting a job or keeping it” because I don’t have one and probably wouldn’t ever be able to get an academic job unless romance scholarship became an absolutely massive boom area. Luckily for me, this isn’t a problem at the moment.
#3 by carolyn jean on March 24, 2009 - 2:53 pm
Thanks for this perspective on the realities of pursuing a subject like this in academia. I hadn’t realized! I hope it turns out to be amazingly great for Sarah et. al’s careers in the end, and that all the other professors will be AWED by their boldness.
This just reminds me I need to visit TMT more often. I don’t always track with everything – I go in and out of being their audience, and I’m a relative newbie to the genre as well, but it really does seem like important work. Thanks you guys!!
#4 by KristieJ on March 24, 2009 - 10:18 pm
I’ve really enjoyed these two RRR QE posts! It’s fun getting to see what’s ‘behind’ the blogger. And while I haven’t visited Teach Me Tonight, I shall do so in the future. And how sweet that they are really spotlighting the positive aspects of the romance genre – and there are many positive ones aren’t there – in a academical way – although *sweet* may not be the adjective of choice *g*.
#5 by Eric Selinger on March 24, 2009 - 10:35 pm
Hi, Jessica! I’ll be happy to tell you all about why I started TMT and RomanceScholar, and what my secret ambitions are, etc. But not tonight. I’ve been reading applications all day for my NEH seminar on poetry (http://condor.depaul.edu/~english/pedagogy/poetry/neh/index.html), and just can’t think or write any more.
Laura, I’m very glad to see you getting the praise you deserve. What aplomb & finesse in your answers!
Sarah, glad to hear you’re back to doing those little fiddly things we all appreciate so much! Hmmm…. That didn’t come out quite right. But you know what I mean.
More soon, if you’d like.
E
#6 by Jessica on March 25, 2009 - 5:31 am
Eric Selinger wrote:
Would love to know it — I will subject you personally to the questionnaire when you have the time, okay?
Laura Vivanco wrote:
There was a time I heard this term and shuddered, because it represented one possible awful nonchosen fate (as a spouse of an academic, this is the route the other spouse often goes). I now hear the term and think positive, wistful thoughts. How things change!
Anyway, if you look at the PCA romance roster, you see that tenured academics are on panels with high school teachers, independent scholars, people of diverse fields of study, romance authors, and others.
I have sat on many a program committee over the years, and I can tell you that for some of them, no high school teacher or fiction writer would have gotten on the program, no matter how great their proposal (ostensibly under the guise of saving places for tenure stream academics and ABD grad students, but everyone knows that’s not the whole reason).
I know some of it is born of necessity, but this kind of inclusiveness, and unwillingness to allow external markers of academic status fully determine the worth of someone’s work, is really terrific in my view.
#7 by Laura Vivanco on March 25, 2009 - 6:03 am
Carolyn Jean, I don’t know if you’d be interested in this, but I’ve got a summary list of a selection of the TMT posts I’ve written that I think are the most interesting and/or touch on interesting subjects. It’s here. Since I was putting the index on my personal webpage, I didn’t index any posts by the other contributors, but thanks to the tags at TMT, if you’re interested in those topics, it’s possible that if you click on the tag, something will come up by someone else, and most of the posts are also tagged with the name of the writer, so that would make it easier to find the posts by a specific poster.
Kristie, you’d be very welcome if you did pop in, but I fully understand that sometimes our content can be long and therefore time-consuming to read, or for a variety of other reasons it may not be what someone wants to read at a particular time. Some of my posts on specific novels are full of spoilers, for example. We’re not always positive about the genre, because it’s important to critique some aspects of it too. I suppose it’s the equivalent of not always giving 5-star-plus reviews. If all we did was say how great everything was, I don’t think our writing would be either true or credible.
There was a time I heard this term and shuddered, because it represented one possible awful nonchosen fate (as a spouse of an academic, this is the route the other spouse often goes). I now hear the term and think positive, wistful thoughts. How things change!
I am indeed the spouse of another academic.
I know some of it is born of necessity, but this kind of inclusiveness, and unwillingness to allow external markers of academic status fully determine the worth of someone’s work, is really terrific in my view.
It no doubt shows how naive I am and how unaware I am of how to go about building an academic career, but I never even thought of the possibility of exclusion. After all, I’ve got my PhD and a publications record, so it never occurred to me that anyone would think I was anything other than an academic. In the area of romance, jay Dixon wrote a very important study of Mills & Boon, and she’s an independent scholar. That was another thing that gave me the impression that being an independent scholar wasn’t going to be a problem. Now that you’ve mentioned the possibility I’ll bear it in mind.
#8 by Eric Selinger on March 25, 2009 - 9:48 am
Hi, Jessica! I’d be honored. Maybe after PCA, and before the big Princeton romance conference, mid-April?
#9 by Tumperkin on March 25, 2009 - 5:50 pm
I’m just going to add my *nod* here re TMT. I’m a regular lurker and occasional commenter there. They manage to combine being inclusive and welcoming with being rigorous and questioning in a very pleasing way.
#10 by Janine on March 25, 2009 - 6:41 pm
Wonderful interview. I am really enjoying this series.
I must say I have tremendous respect and admiration for the romance scholar community. When I was undergrad in the late eighties, there was a graduate seminar on popular culture at my university which took a feminist approach to looking at soap operas, romances and other aspects of popular culture. I begged the professor to let me in to this course, but it was in high demand and as I was not a graduate student, there was no room for me. I still remember my disappointment. I purchased the books on the syllabus, which inlcuded Radway’s Reading the Romance, a book I kept wanting to argue with.
I’ve been out of school for a long time, but as someone who once enjoyed the analysis that went into writing papers on film and literature, I really appreciate the thought that goes into it.
And I also have to confess to a little envy of Eric, Laura, Sarah, and the rest of the romance scholars. Not that I don’t love reviewing for DA and trying my own hand at romance writing, but the grass is always greener… and I have this fantasy about constructing a romance syllabus for eager students… Maybe in another life.
#11 by Eric Selinger on March 25, 2009 - 6:52 pm
What makes me so happy, Janine (and Jessica), is that we can actually talk about a “romance scholar community” now. When I got into this field four years ago, there wasn’t one, and I had a devil of a time getting in touch with other folks working on the genre. (There was a listserv, Romance Readers Anonymous, but it wasn’t focused on scholarship as such.)
The short answer to why I founded TMT and RomanceScholar, the listserv that has given us a name, lies right in Janine’s post. I wanted there to be a “romance scholar community,” and now there is one, sooner and bigger and more active than I’d ever hoped. We have scholars and grad students working on four continents, all in touch with each other. And thanks to Sarah, soon we’ll be a formal Association!
Feeling pretty darned good right now, I must say. Thanks for reminding me why I spent all this time on something other than my own scholarship!
#12 by Jessica on March 25, 2009 - 8:11 pm
Eric Selinger wrote:
Even the name is depressing! The community really has come a long way in a short time!
#13 by Laura Vivanco on March 26, 2009 - 6:56 am
They manage to combine being inclusive and welcoming with being rigorous and questioning in a very pleasing way.
[Laura fluffs out her feathers and suns a little bit more] Thanks, Tumperkin. I’m really glad you think so because I do very much want to make our visitors feel welcome, whether they lurk or whether they comment. The genre belongs to all of us, and although I can’t guarantee never to use jargon or to always write in a way that’s as clear as possible, I hope what we’re doing at TMT makes our academic work accessible rather than something that’s restricted to a tiny group of scholars. I see us as being part of the romance community, and I hope other members of the romance community feel able to come across and read, query, or critique what we’ve written.
#14 by Eric Selinger on March 26, 2009 - 4:32 pm
Hi, everyone! The Princeton romance conference website is now LIVE, with registration info (it’s free, but seating is limited) and a full schedule. You can find it at http://www.princeton.edu/prcw/. Swing by, take a look–and if you’re in the area, I hope I’ll see you there!