Hey, I was in graduate school in the 70s, so I’m old-school. What we did & studied back then was known as mental masturbation. So it’s “competent bullshit” now? It seems as though standards may have slipped a bit. (Present company excepted, of course!)

” My department met on Friday for a preliminary discussion of the junior search we’ll be conducting this Fall. [One of my colleagues] proposed that “any applicant who has a paper in [such a] book should be immediately placed in the ‘no thanks’ pile.” To my surprise, no one objected to the sentiment.”

“What makes the (overwhelming majority of the) essays in the series harmful is that they present themselves as philosophy, but are in fact incompetent bullshitting. So, the non-philosopher to whom the books are aimed is given a defective and misleading model of what philosophy is.”

“All one has to do is take a look at any of the volumes to find that they’re a haven for the incompetent. ”

Just had to share.

Sub-culture.

That’s what we are.

Susan Boyle

@Jessica

How about something like this or if that wouldn’t work could we start a fund/grant to mitigate risk for the editors/publisher because now I really want to read about Xena, Wonder Woman, and whatever area of the romance genre you decide to tackle. (Notice I said AND not or)

I keep turning this whole thing around in my head. Discussing it with my neighbor, who’s anti-romance because it’s not her thing. But even she agrees the topic has merit. So is there anything that non-academia/non-contributor types can do to help you make this project into a reality?

As an aside: I saw Christine Feehan doing an ad for her latest Carpathian novel on Hulu today.

Just wanted to say that I found your comment hilarious (the last paragraph had me spluttering on my drink) and tragically true. Thank you.

We have that sort of problem in the chasm between romance (as a genre) and almost all other genre fiction. People who read romances read other stuff — lots of other stuff. People who don’t read romances have preconceived notions about romances that are informed by everything EXCEPT actual knowledge. I’m not an anime/manga fan, but I’ve read one. Good luck finding someone who can say the same thing about romances.

Which still doesn’t get to the very heart of the problem, which has something to do with what I call “potato chip” thinking. That’s the idea that all romance novels are pretty much the same, and you just want to consume them one after another without much concern about flavor/quality/cost, etc. They’re potato chips.

I had lunch recently with an accountant friend of mine. I was surprised to hear that she enjoyed romance novels (we should wear badges or develop the romance novel equivalent of “gaydar” so we can find each other more easily), but even more surprised to hear her say that she couldn’t name a favorite romance author. Here’s an intelligent, educated woman with strong opinions on a lot of topics. And she can simultaneously say she’s a fan of romances *and* that she doesn’t even remember which authors she’s read. I was stunned. She even admitted she read them the way she would eat potato chips.

Whether it’s true or not, there is a perception that one romance novel is pretty much the same as the next, and to start talking about the relative merits of a Nora Roberts vs. a Linda Howard is a bit like comparing Lays with Pringles. Of course we know that’s absurd, but that’s because we’ve read — and thought about — Nora Roberts’ and Linda Howard’s books.

That is to say, those of us who a) read romance novels (and 98% of those who read romance novels are self-proclaimed romance fans) and b) see the differences, uniqueness, relative level of quality in the books we read, we’re the ones who can see romance as pop culture. We’re all type AB — we can read everything and we can tell the difference. I suspect all those editors you were negotiating with were type O — willing to donate their Opinion to the rest of the world. Try giving them a transfusion of AB blood in the form of a Nora Roberts novel, and they’ll have a bad reaction.

As we’ve seen…

Anyway, sometimes I wonder if romance doesn’t shoot itself in the foot by using the larger political/cultural issues as turning points but treating them so superfiscially/as story props. It makes it just that little bit easier to scoff at the whole without looking at the parts.
I don’t think all romance authors do this.

Neither do I. I was talking broad generalizations but the fact of the matter is that with the sheer number of romance novels published that the likelihood that a non-romance reader would pick one off that shelf that dwelved deeply into the mentioned topics is rather small, isn’t it?

One might have to dig a bit deeper into the romance genre to find books like this, but they do exist and they make me think that there’s lots of scope for a book about philosophy which takes romances as a starting point….

No argument from me there but you really hae to get past the preconceived biases, not just of the editors but also the book buyers and the general public. I think DocTurtle from SBTB is pretty good example of someone who’s been amazingly open and fair about exposing himself to the romance genre. But how does he compare to the either the editors or the masses?

—

I once belonged to a weekly Socrates Cafe group. There was a criticism by one of members that the conversation/questions always swung around to WWII, The Nazis, etc. She flat out challenged us to see if we could manage a night without defaulting to “high” concept arguments and stick with arguments that were more personal and/or directly related to our more immediate surrounding/conditions.

I bring this up because I think as a whole a romance philosophy discussion has a similiar vein to it. It’s much more personal and immediate. And in our group there was a tendency to “flinch” away from the personal and move toward the “big” positions. It’s sometimes easier to turn the mirror away from ourselves and I think romance asks us to look in the mirror on a much more direct personal level.

The other thing I noticed, and this applies more directly to Jessica’s dilemna, is that when topics were proposed, it was generally the ones that geared toward high concepts that got chosen. Here’s a small sampling of the questions we discussed*:

1. Does love really conquer all?
2. Is psychotherapy a reasonable way to handle society’s problems?
3. Is the common good self-evident?
4. Is war ever moral?
5. Is relative thinking hobbling?
6. Are critics good for the art form?
7. What is the purpose of obsession?
8. Are there hierachies of evil?

Our group started out 95% male but by the end we had about a 50/50 split. Primarily white. All different ages (youngest 16, oldest in their 80s) and sexual identities (gay, lesbian, transgender, hetrosexual). Different income and education brackets. Different careers and no philosophy majors. Okay, we had one or two but they drifted away because we weren’t structured enough.

I bring this part up because we were a small group that met weekly. Anywhere from 5 to 10 questions would be submitted each night and yet the list above is pretty typical of the type of questions got choosen.**

So out of the 40 books that have been published what are the deep themes? How do the 3 books that Jessica identified as female topics play into those common themes or maybe they don’t. Maybe the editors don’t even realize how their picks fit a pattern. The question is how can you use the pattern to get the discussion you want.***

* Sorry, I could only remember the phrasing for the short questions and note that even though the question was worded in a certain fashion, the conversation initially got established by question originator so it could veer into totally unexpected directions.

** BTW: My neighbor thought I was nuts. Why would anyone go to a coffee shop to talk with a bunch of strangers about such meaningless drivel? LOL

** If I wanted to discuss a certain topic at the Socrates Cafe, I had to word my question in such a manner that it got chosen with only the question itself. We weren’t allowed to explain what we meant by the question or what areas we hoped to target until after the question was chosen for that evening’s discussion. It was a very interesting lesson in identifying patterns and honing down/packaging concepts with as few words as possible. Something I’ve been failing at within this thread.

Anyway, sometimes I wonder if romance doesn’t shoot itself in the foot by using the larger political/cultural issues as turning points but treating them so superfiscially/as story props. It makes it just that little bit easier to scoff at the whole without looking at the parts.

I don’t think all romance authors do this. Jo Beverley, in North American Romance Writers, for example, writes that

An honest writer must include her own philosophies in her work, and my beliefs about heroism, about honor, shape my characters’ dilemmas. Sometimes, I hope, those dilemmas will strike the reader as particularly interesting or thought-provoking. (33)

and

Too often romance in the past achieved tidy solutions by the heroine conforming to the hero’s needs. As a feminist, I reject this. Throughout the course of my books I like to show both hero and heroine discovering what they will die for and what they can compromise on as they attempt to reach that final melding we call the happy ending. (34)

Miles Vorkosigan in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Komarr has to make a decision about how to deal with terrorists who’re holding the woman he loves captive. He puts the needs of his country/planet first. Admittedly the whole series isn’t exactly “romance” and this is the only book in the series that I’ve read, but this book is the beginning of Miles’s romance with Ekaterin.

In a non-political context, there’s sacrifice for the sake of honour/duty in Mary Balogh’s A Precious Pearl, where the hero has to send the woman he loves away because he feels he cannot abandon his wife.

One might have to dig a bit deeper into the romance genre to find books like this, but they do exist and they make me think that there’s lots of scope for a book about philosophy which takes romances as a starting point. The authors of the philosophy essays wouldn’t be limited to discussing the most obviously romance-genre topics such as love, but would actually be able to write about lots of other issues which do come up in the genre and are explored in considerable depth by some of them.