1. Links of interest (It turns out I can live without Twitter longer than I can live without my Google reader). Keep in mind, I make no pretense of being “newsy”, so some of these are pretty stale in blog years.

Laura Vivanco gets interviewed for a fantastic piece on romance by the Yale Herald (why does a student newspaper succeed where so many major media outlets fail?), and offers a sharp critique of the Carroll article I mentioned last week at Teach Me Tonight.

Carolyn Crane is a member of the League of Reluctant Adults and she is exposing their secrets!!!

Why Are there No Fat Vampires? from Womanist Musings.

“Can Authors Balance Privacy and Publicity in the Internet Era? at Nathan Bransford — read it for the comments. And Magdalen talking about the same thing on the very same day.

“The Adulterous Wife”, Toril Moi’s negative review of the highly anticipated new Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier translation of The Second Sex in the LRB. Moi’s piece isn’t just a review but a fascinating comparison between the two translations and meditation on the problems of translation.

The Era of Casual Fridays, (via (from Books, Inq.) a blog by Mark Richardson, professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto and Robert Frost scholar, meditates on the profession of English, asking

Is it possible to be compromised, even corrupted, by what we write and read and teach, and by how we write, read, and teach it?

In “What’s Up With All the Romances?” the Witchy Chicks ask why romances get all the shelf space in the supermarket, Walmart and even bookstore. Something I’d never considered, so used I am to thinking of romance as the underdog.

AnimeJune’s Instant Classic, “How to Exploit the Dead For Fun and Profit” criticizes the trend of new paranormal twists on old favorites novels.

Author Emily Bryan is continuing her series Regency Men Undressed, and she’s down to the underthings.

Harlequin Spice author Victoria Janssen’s blog had its first birthday Friday. Happy Anniversary, Victoria!

Janicu is offering helpful advice about BEA and the Book Bloggers’ Convention, talking about bookish spots in NYC to visit and admire.

A number of personal posts floated my boat these past days:

Harlequin Presents author Kate Hewitt talks about the personal memories that inspired The Greek Tycoon’s Reluctant Bride. It turns out Ms. Hewitt, whose married name is Mrs. Thermopolous, IS the reluctant bride of a Greek Tycoon. Kidding!

Mandi of Smexy Books told her tale of true love over at Fiction Vixen. It’s very funny!

2. Flurry of Posts on the In Crowd … Katiebabs and then Karen Scott and then Mrs. Giggles posted on the question of an “in crowd” in romance blogging. Sarah Tanner followed up with the question of bloggers responding to comments. Everyone else has put their own spin on it. Here’s mine.

For me, the fact that blogging has made me feel like part of a community is one of the most surprising things about it. (The other surprising thing is that I am developing a research interest in popular romance scholarship. This is a bit afield of the biomedical ethics I have been working on the past several years, but I’ve hatched a scheme to connect vampire romance to bioethics in a totally unexpected and bloody way). I wonder sometimes if one of the needs Romland meets for me is to seem to have a group of girlfriends — not couples friends, and not colleague friends, — in a way I really haven’t since I was an undergraduate. It’s fun.

As for being snubbed, I guess my feeling is you can’t make people notice you or admire you or like you. The other side is that they can’t demand it of you either, which is a big relief, to me at least. We all owe each other a basic level of respect if we cross cyberpaths (though we can and do argue about what that entails in specific cases), but beyond that, nada.

Of course, sometimes we won’t get that respect, and sometimes we’ll fail to give it. We’re human beings, some of us humaner than others. This is where the thick skin is so important, even more online than in real life, for obvious reasons.

I was surprised how quickly Katiebabs’ post turned, on Karen’s blog, into a discussion of DA and SBTB, because to be honest, I don’t think big blogs have any sort of monopoly on in-group formation. I mean, you have the Katiebabs/Book Smugglers/AnimeJune Clique (SBAK). Don’t think it’s a clique? Fine. When’s the last time Ana invited you to her place in the UK? And how about those SoCal bloggers? It’s so exclusive I would have to move 3000 miles to join it!! Then there’s the m/m clique — you know who you are. There’s the SPRS Mafia (led by SarahF. and Eric, but An Goris is the Enforcer). And Kristie(j)’s clique is so exclusive no one even KNOWS who is in it.

So it was a bit of a non sequitur to me at first that the discussion went to the long thread at Karen’s about DA and SBTB. My theory is that people trying to make sense of what it means for there to be leaders in the Romanceland community. When I post on something, my few hundred readers, which includes few if any people of influence or standing in the industry, assume it is some random woman’s opinion. When someone at DA or SBTB post, their thousands of readers — which include many influential people in the romance and book publishing industries — assume it is a representative opinion. There’s a difference. The level of sophistication about the industry, the influence, the connectedness, and the visibility beyond the Romland blogosphere of SBTB and DA and others seems new (and I argued it is here). So people are going to talk about them. Like I am doing right now.

I have nothing helpful to actually say about it, but those questions are more intriguing to me than in-groups, which are like the weather — unpredictable, impossible to control, and boring to talk about.

3. What I’m teaching this week (sort of a mini rant)

I’ve mentioned on the blog that most everything I teach and everything I do in my consulting work is very controversial and fraught. Here’s an experiment in talking a little about one of those things on the blog.

We’re finishing an abortion unit in one class. The textbook has one article from a feminist perspective, and it’s by a “pro-life feminist”. By my lights, a feminist perspective has to acknowledge the gendered nature of the issue, the fact that only women become pregnant and bear children, that in most societies the burden of early child care falls disproportionately on women (whether in unpaid or low paid domestic labor), that women’s status as feminine is linked with their status as mothers in a different way than men’s status as masculine is linked with their status as fathers, and that there is gender injustice in most societies. There are lots of pro-choice arguments in favor of abortion that aren’t feminist and I teach at least two of them. I think the feminist pro-choice point of view is so important that I assign an article on e-reserve, but it boggles the mind that I have to do this.

But back to the pro-life feminist piece. I am happy to teach a good anti-choice article from a feminist, just as I teach a range of other anti-choice essays, but I have never found one. The “feminist pro-life” essay in the textbook is so riddled with falsehoods (recycling pro-life movement myths about “post abortion syndrome”, and links between abortions and cancer, for example) and lapses in logic (i.e. that recognizing that we should support women who choose to bring unexpected pregnancies to term with public funds if necessary somehow implies we should prevent those who choose to abort from doing so; or that, because 19th century feminists were pro-life, so should 21st century feminists be.) that I have to ask myself whether my rationale that it is a useful way to explore commonly held falsehoods and faulty arguments is strong enough. I think it’s the last time I’ll teach that one.

4. Personal

I hope you had a good Valentine’s Day, if you wanted to, and I hope you successfully ignored it, if that was your desire. My husband bought me something I’ve wanted, an electric tea kettle, and made me a pot of tea. We get our tea from Upton Tea Imports. We don’t do a lot of romantic things for Valentine’s Day. We’ll have to take whatever measure of comfort we can in our phenomenal sex life. (Kidding!) (Wait… Not kidding!) (Erm. Ahem.)

Doug Fieger, lead singer of the Knack (and Jewish, I might add), the band that brought us “My Sharona”, is dead at 57.

Some of you may recall “My Sharona” from the shit 1994 film Reality Bites, starring Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder. Yours Truly remembers “My Sharona” from the 45 I bought in 1979.

As for blogging, I have lost my reviewing mojo. Yes, I wrote that snarky review on Friday, but that’s different. I have a host of half-finished reviews. I still want to read, and I still want to blog. But I hope the reviewing slump passes.

I’ll have to write a review this week for Keishon’s TBR challenge. My book is Kathleen O’Reilly’s first (I think) book, a 2001 Jove historical called Touched by Fire starring the challenge’s February theme, a virgin hero.

I am running a contest. Winner can choose four books from a selection. But you have to write a purple prose paragraph to enter. Warning: the thread is already a brain bleeder.

HAPPY WEEK!

1. Links:

a. I can’t do a Links of Interest section since I nuked my Google reader, but I will mention the contest I am running — the winner may choose any two books from those listed.

b. Also, on the subject of book bloggers and conferences, I discovered –or rather, Kristin of Fantasy Cafe discovered and told me about –  a new one, the Book Blogger Convention, May 28 in NYC, which overlaps with the Book Expo America.  The Keynote One featured speaker is Ron Hogan, speaking on Professionalism and Ethics in Blogging (EDITED TO ADD: thanks to Natasha from Maw Books setting me straight on that. Keynote TBA). I confess I don’t know anything about Ron Hogan, but I see that Thea of The Book Smugglers is on a panel about Marketing, and Mandi of Smexy Books is on the list of attendees. Looking around the BEA website, it looks to me like it’s for industry professionals — authors and editors and the like. The Book Blogger Convention has affiliated with BEA, and is offering admission to BEA with your BBC badge. You can enter a contest for free admission to the Book Blogger Con — contest ends Friday. It goes without saying that I am thinking about going.

EDITED TO ADD: Katiebabs had a long, informative post about these events, based on insider knowledge and her attendance in 2009. Sorry I did not see it the first time.

c. I was really shocked to read author Laura Kinsale’s comment on Dear Author’s conversational review of her new book, Lessons in French (which I still haven’t read). In response to a reviewer’s (and some responders’) comment that the book was “melancholy”, Kinsale wrote “Piffle Diffle”  and “Just. No.” and “I draw the line at melancholy”.

I’d like to say something about this, because she made a similar comment here, and I find these sorts of comment potentially chilling of the kind of discussion readers must have if fiction is to flourish in a society (note that “potentially” is a pretty generous way to interpret the intentions of someone who basically tells people to cut it out).  Authors don’t get to tell readers how to experience their books, and that is what one is doing, even when one adds “winks” and jokey asides to one’s comment. An author can say “Huh. I am really surprised you experienced the book as melancholy because that was not my intention while writing it”.  Or — and I know it sounds crazy — but one might even consider saying something like, “Huh. Maybe I didn’t write as clearly as I wanted to, if so many experienced genre readers and thoughtful people failed to hear the tone I was going for.” (I do this if a majority of my students get a quiz question wrong. I assume the fault is mine, in the way I worded it.). But telling a reader “Just. No.” and then pointing out that other (Presumably better? More careful? Smarter?) readers read it the way the author intended in order to buttress one’s view is, as she herself put it, “an author behaving badly”.

Romance readers are not passive automatons, thoughtlessly imbibing authors’ words. Reading is an interaction between reader and text, and it is unique every time. The relationship that is forged between the author and the reader requires respect on both sides.  The reviewers of Lessons in French demonstrated that respect by carefully reading the text and engaging in thoughtful dialogue with others about it. If only the author had done the same.

2. Personal

a. My work situation: Still confusing. No one knows what the hell is going on, although some signs have me thinking positively. But I found out something good:  Tenured faculty get severance pay for 18 months if let go (clearly, I have never read my contract in all these years. What a revelation!). What this means is that I do not have to job hunt right this minute. So that’s something to be not unhappy about.

b. My husband’s promotion to full professor became official this morning. He is such a hot ticket, that guy. He was tenured and promoted to associate prof a mere 24 months before he submitted his documents for full. I love you and am so proud of you! We are having a BIG PARTY!!!

3. Summary and discussion of “The Paradox of Junk fiction” Noel Carroll, Philosophy and Literature, 18(2), 1994 (p. 225-241)

“The Paradox of Junk Fiction” is an essay by Noel Carroll, a very well known philosopher of fiction and film. He defines “junk fiction” as, basically, genre fiction with “extremely limited repertoire of story types”.  Examples include Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark, and Agatha Christie. With junk fiction “we read for story.” Junk fictions tell the same story over and over again, says Carroll, with “minor variations”. Junk fiction readers read these variations against a “well-established background of narrative forms.” The reader “knows in some sense how the story is going to go”. He writes, “If you have read one Harlequin romance, it might be argued, you have read them all. You know how it will turn out.”

(By the way, the term “junk fiction” refers to Thomas Roberts’, An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, which I am about to read. According to Carroll, Roberts addresses a slightly different question, namely how genre readers can speak so ill of the books they love.)

So, the paradox is that people read junk fiction for the story, for the “page turning” aspect. But these readers know antecedently how the story will turn out. What to do?

Carroll rejects pretty much outright the first option, which we can call “biting the bullet”. That is, accepting the paradox as it stands and admitting that, yup, we are irrational. For example, you could take a Freudian approach and say junk fiction operates to meet some unconscious need, either wish fulfillment (he cites romance here) or manifesting deep anxieties (horror).  My problems with such Freudian interpetations are their (a) inability to be disproven, and (b) tendency to make readers passive. So I agree with Carroll here.

Another possibility is offered by Roberts, who says that junk fiction is genre reading and genre reading is system reading, it is intertextual. Reading individual stories may be simple, but the system is complex.  What interests genre readers are “convergences, contrasts and extensions” in story type. It;s the fine grained appreciation of difference genre readers seek (that the apparent heroine is killed off early on in Psycho, for example, is even more enjoyably shocking to those versed in horror, because they know it is not supposed to happen).

Carroll admits that most fans read “comparatively” in a genre, but he denies that this is the core element of junk fiction reading. Many junk fiction readers just read for story, and they don’t perform these fine grained comparison. (for example, when I chatted with a bank teller about JR Ward. she doesn’t know JR Ward wrote any other books besides the one she’s now reading, never mind the subgenre paranormal romance. so, while I am very attracted to Roberts’ theory for other reasons, I don’t think he has described all genre readers.)

But Carroll appreciates that Roberts may be on to something: maybe readers of junk fiction get other kinds of enjoyment besides narrative enjoyment out of their stories. For example, the enjoyment of  “readerly activities of interpretation and inference”. And guess what genre he uses as an example here? Romance! I almost passed out when I saw that. Carroll cites Betty Neels’ The Quiet Professor. Click on the passage below to enlarge:

Junk fiction engages the reader in a “transactional process”. As readers, we enjoy “self rewarding cognitive activity”. Readers also derive pleasure or satisfaction from a range of moral and emotional activities and judgments they make as they read.

Carroll pauses for a minute to distinguish his preferred resolution to the cultural studies’ solution of “recoding and rereading” texts. That is, readers of junk fiction don’t really read for the story the author is telling, rather they read for their own recoded version. Romance readers who read JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood as a love story between Butch and Vishous might count as recoders in this sense. But the classic example is the one Carroll uses — native peoples cheering when the white man gets killed in a western. Carroll reject this idea: he thinks lefty cultural studies folks overstate drastically the amount of resistant reading that actually occurs. And he thinks it’s better on philosophical grounds to dissolve the paradox of junk fiction using readers that are not arbitrary, but actually “proposed by the text in a structured way” (he really reveals his hand when he suggests recodings are arbitrary. I doubt they are.).

Next Carroll responds to the objection that ALL reading, even of what he calls “ambitious fiction*” (i.e. literature) is cognitively, emotionally, and morally challenging in the way junk fiction is. Carroll admits it — such fictions may even “stimulate more readerly activities” than junk fiction. “Ambitious fictions” may be more consuming, and there may be a continuum of engagement required (after all, genre fiction is meant to be easily and quickly read. But we are not to confuse this with the claim that junk fiction readers are passive. they aren’t and they can;t be, if Carroll’s proposed solution is to work), but it’s all of a piece. nevertheless, this is not a problem for his argument, he says, because all he is trying to do is dissolve the paradox of junk fiction.

[*Carroll's term "ambitious fiction" is not a helpful descriptor of non junk-fiction. I'm betting he was looking for a word for literary or modern fiction that doesn't diminish junk fiction. First of all, the jig was up when he adopted the term "junk fiction". but second, "ambition" fails utterly to distinguish literature and genre writers, since they are all about the most ambitious people you could hope to meet.  The only way "ambitious" distinguishes the two kinds of writing is if you implicitly smuggle in extra words like "ambitious to write a great novel", but you're back where you started. ]

So, to recap, a paradox occurs when two incompatible statements both seem true. In this case, it’s:

1. Junk fiction readers read for story, and if knowing the story they will lose interest in it.

2. Junk fiction readers are genre readers. Genre is formulaic, so junk fiction readers already know the story.

Carroll proposes to reject (1) as false, dissolving the paradox.

Does anyone sle see a problem with defining junk fiction as “fiction you read for story” and then arguing that “junk fiction readers don’t really read for story: they read for cognitive, emotional, and moral engagement”?

Personally, while I agree that genre fiction readers read for both story and for the other readerly activities Carroll lists, as well as for the comparative activities Roberts mentions, I would jettison #2. We don’t know the story.

What do you think?