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Death, the Body, Sex, Life
It had been a good morning so far. My two classes went well. As usual on MWF, I met my husband, who had also just finished teaching, at the bottom of the stairs and we walked together to his office to catch up, talking about camps for the kids next week, finalizing summer cottage rental plans, griping about the usual university business, and, naturally, detouring into Star Trek Deep Space Nine and the origin of the word “ferengi” and whether the Ferengi were portrayed in an anti-Semitic way, and what other ethnicities might be said, stereotypically, to have big noses. As I crossed campus to my office in the philosophy building, it felt like spring. I noticed black capped chickadees at the feeders outside the Union, and I imagined I felt the sun’s warmth on my cheek, wan though it was. As I considered unzipping my down jacket, I decided I’ve lived in Maine too long if a 30 degree day with snow on the ground counts as “springlike.”
When I returned to my office, I listened to a vague, brief message from my Hospice volunteer coordinator. I dreaded calling him back, because I knew what it was: my hospice friend had died this morning. I was shocked: I had just spent the afternoon with him a few days ago. He was animated and sharp. He told me about long car trips with his wife back in the days when he was a high school teacher. She would read student essays out loud, and he would tell her what to mark them. She would argue with him, and it would make the time fly by. When you spend a lot of time with dying people, you begin to believe that you can tell when it’s going to happen. What a joke. I was not ready for him to go. I thought we had many more afternoons, listening to the Bach station from the coast, sipping tea, and talking about his life.
On Monday night, I co-led a humanities workshop with my colleague on death and dying. Truth be told, I did that for my chair, and was not looking forward to staying so late on campus, missing dinner with my family, and losing work time. But we found we had gathered a strange assortment of faculty, administrators, staff, and students, who all, for their own reasons, really wanted to be there. One faculty member was dealing with the loss of his father. Another faculty member, in communications, was working on a project in which he had to read narratives of parents about the moment they lost their child, and he had nowhere else to go with his strange feelings of grief.
Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive; the body animates and nourishes the world inwardly, and forms with it a system. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
One of the things we were trying to get across, via Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and others, was a fact that is often hidden from us: our bodies maintain our life world. So a crisis with the body can become a crisis of our entire world. From the point of view of phenomenologists, we can never understand death until we understand what it means to be a lived body.
Our bodies are the center of our activity in the world. Think about it: we may say that “the paper is lying on the desk next to the clock”, but we don’t say, of ourselves, “the arm is lying on the desk next to the clock”, although it might well be. And it is because of the centrality of our bodies to our experience that they are so intimately related to our selves. Indeed, there is hardly a distinction to be made between body and self. Yet, at the same time, our bodies are in constant communion with the world that is not us. The body is unavoidably socially expressive, but it is at the same time what is being expressed. Following Wittgenstein, the contorted face, the redness, the loudness, is the rage, not just the expression of the rage. The body is thus essentially personal, and essential social, and essentially physical, and we must try to understand it in all these dimensions.
Of course, this spatiality — personal, social, and physical — is imbued with temporality. We are always in time, and perhaps one of the reasons aging makes us nervous is that our bodies seem to be the most permanent, intimate parts of ourselves. If my body (as I know it, as it is familiar to me) goes, what is left of me? As human being, our mortality is always a part of the horizon of our being. Heidegger has written, “as soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die.” In that sense, no death is “untimely” because death is the condition of life. We talk about death all the time (“did you hear? Whitney Houston just died.”), but it is always in terms of what Heidegger called “the they”, never as our own, ineliminably personal death. This is captured perfectly by Marcel Duchamp’s grave:
"Besides, it is always other people who die."
I recently reread Forever by Judy Blume. Near the end of the novel, Katherine is teaching tennis at a summer camp, and becomes friendly and flirtatious with a fellow instructor, Theo, despite the fact that she has a boyfriend back home. When Kat’s grandfather dies, she seeks Theo out and tries to have sex with him. He tells her that she is having a normal reaction to death, trying to prove she’s alive, but he doesn’t want their relationship to begin that way. On the one hand, I think Theo’s resistance was honorable, the right choice. On the other, I wonder if he wasn’t making a false distinction between Kat’s self and Kat’s body.
Another recent read was a Spice Brief, an erotic short, by Anne Calhoun, called What She Needs. I was reminded as I read it of how well erotic writers — good ones, that is — bring our attention to the features of embodiment I’ve outlined above, to the fact that we don’t just live through our bodies, but live with and in communion with them.
In a very different, and more uncomfortable way, mystery writers also call us to attention to our bodies. Corpses are socially expressive. They have many of the same features of other bodies. In a very real sense, the person is still with us when we behold the corpse, even if the “self” is not. Good writers can communicate the social and expressive power of a corpse in a way that reminds us of our own finitude and embodied selves.
So, I’ve been thinking about death all week. From both theoretical and personal perspectives. Death calls to mind the many ways I am grateful to writers who explore, and thus encourage me to explore, the features of bodily existence that I too often take for granted.
What I’m up to this semester: teaching, speaking, blogging, etc.
I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions, but I live on the semester system, so I tend to think in 14 week blocks. In the interest of writing an easy blog post this morning, I thought I’d share some of my plans.
1. Teaching: I’m teaching a feminist philosophy course, so expect a number of related posts. This semester, I added some articles on the transgender experience, and on the Third Wave (over the years, I have tried using some of the popular third wave anthologies, like Third Wave Agenda, and Colonize This!, but, while they may work well for an interdisciplinary WST course, I found them lacking for a philosophy course. Unfortunately, because students love them.). I’m also teaching Ethics, which is not an applied course but a theory course, rooted in the history of philosophy. In a nod to my own personal history, I added Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, something that made a huge impression on me as an undergraduate, but which I’ve never taught, and a section on twentieth century Anglo-analytic ethical theory (Moore, Pritchard, Ross, Ayer), a nod to my graduate training. I predict great love for the former and great hate for the latter. We’ll see.
2. Speaking: I decided not to go to any out of state conferences this semester. I have a bad habit of preparing papers for conferences and then not turning them into journal articles. I am not allowing myself to go to another conference until I write up and submit at least two papers from conferences I’ve attended in the past two years. Of course, I’m committed to a number of talks in Maine, including for our state’s Breastfeeding Coalition annual meeting, our state’s Family Physicians annual meeting, regular talks for the hospital (I have one on a tough Jehovah’s Witness case next week), and, in a new endeavor, a talk on blogging for our local library, with Kristen of Fantasy Cafe. On campus, there’s a new humanities initiative, and my colleague Kirsten and I are doing a seminar on end of life. Her perspective is phenomenology, especially Merleau-Ponty, and mine tends to be very clinically based Anglo-Amercian ethics. Faculty are supposed to sign up, and we have a day of talking and sharing. There is more I could say about the humanities initiative on our campus, but this is one of those times I’d better keep my own counsel.
3. Ethics consulting: Our formal consult service has been up and running for about five years now (although informally, it is older than that). We’ve decided to set up a database on our hospital’s intranet with “scrubbed” cases, organized by keywords, which staff can search. I’m shaking a little just typing that, because I know how much work it is going to be, but I’m very excited that the IT Gods are giving us server space, and that staff are actually asking for this, which suggests that some people think we are doing something right. I’m still not going to blog about ethics consulting, for obvious reasons.
4. Blogging: I’m not doing any challenges and I don’t set reading goals. I’m not sure why, because I like to have, for example, fitness goals, but reading challenges, like book clubs, take the fun out of reading for me. Last semester, I found that making the blog work to meet my non-blog goals was very good for me and the blog. So, for example, to prepare for class, I would write a blog post. Or I’d write about what I was reading, even if it wasn’t something I felt people would be interested in. It’s a little scary not having a “niche” in the blogging world, but I’m fine with it, and certainly not the only person who blogs this way. I found that staying away from kerfuffles was, on balance, the right choice last semester, so I plan to keep mostly away from drama, although many of them are irresistibly fascinating and also pretty important.
5. Readers’ conferences: I’ve had a hard time deciding whether and which readers’ conference to attend this year. I signed up for a small readers retreat in Manchester, Vermont in April. But for big conferences, it’s looking like Book Blogger Con/BEA in New York is my choice this year. I would love to attend Romantic Times, before all the OTT stuff that once made it the stuff of romance fandom legend is gone, but the timing is (nearly) impossible. We’ll see.
6. Parenting: After 12 years of practice, I continue to be a devious, unsympathetic and reluctant parent. Just kidding. Sort of. I made my sons, ages 10 and 12, sign up for ski lessons. Kids are grouped by ability, not age. They had loads of same age friends in the lodge, but when everybody skied out to meet their groups, my sons went one way, and their peers went another. They ended up in a group composed almost entirely of five year old girls. I have been giggling over it ever since. Here’s a pic (my boys in the foreground, instructors on the right):
This is the last weekend of winter break. We plan to spend it in our usual relaxed, not to say indolent, manner, with friends for dinner, warm fires, lots of reading, and a couple of walks in the woods with our dogs. Whatever you are up to this weekend, I hope you enjoy it.
Thoughts on Teaching Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me
Last week, my Ethics and Fiction class (syllabus here) read Bet Me. I had prepared students the week before by assigning a chapter of Joanne Hollows (which I blogged about in 2009), and adding my own commentary and critique on the genre. I thought I’d share (with their permission) some of their reactions and some of my reactions to their reactions. Pardon me in advance for the scattershot nature of this post.
Long time readers might recall that the last time I taught this class, I attempted to teach Patricia Gaffney’s To Have and To Hold. It was a bit of a disaster. I wrote a post about it here. This time around, I deliberately chose a novel that might prove less strange, thanks to its contemporary setting and the “romcom” feel, and also because it more obviously thwarts some of the stereotypes of romance novels featured in the Hollows reading.
The class is an advanced undergrad course, crosslisted in English and Philosophy. Almost everyone in it was either a philosophy major, English major or both. Most of the students are avid readers, and many are creative writers as well. I had six women, two of whom dropped the course midsemester, and about ten men. It was a terrific semester with this group, overall.
In terms of liking Bet Me, there was a clear gender correlation at the extremes, but not for the majority of the group. That is, the two who liked it the most, and plan to read more Crusie or more romance fiction, were women, and the two who really hated it were men. The rest were mixed.
Teaching romance fiction, especially when it is just one item on a syllabus of literary fiction, is like teaching uphill. It reminds me a little bit of teaching feminist theory as part of an ethics class as opposed to a course in feminist theory. That is, unlike virtually every other text we have read this semester, students have already passed negative judgment on the book prior to opening it, and may not be as open to seeing good writing, deft plotting, or compelling characterization when it’s there. Even when they do see something aesthetically worthwhile, it has to come up through the haze of criticism, as when one student said that “despite the romance novel’s strict guidelines, good writing can shine through.” Surprisingly, at least one student’s dislike of romance novels came directly from a rather intense dislike of romantic films.
This is a very smart group, and in most cases their criticisms were backed up with textual evidence, as in the criticism of Cynthie, the hero’s psychologist ex-girlfriend, and David, the heroine’s ex-boyfriend, as shallow characters. These two came in for almost universal condemnation in my class as cardboard plot-movers. On the other hand, a student noted both that Crusie did not seem to simply dismiss out of hand Cynthie’s “psychological” approach to love, since Cynthie functioned as a kind of Greek chorus for the development of Cal and Min’s relationship, and also that there is a long history in literature of “hilariously ineffectual” antagonists. Other students noted that Cynthie is a foil for Min: they both start out seeing relationships in terms of their respective professions, but Min grows out of that and Cynthie doesn’t.
At times, however, the criticism seemed more based on expectations than what was in the text. It also tended to be framed as a critique of the genre, despite the fact that the student would, at the same time, protest this was the first, last and only romance novel s/he would ever read. I tried to keep us textually based, and tried to contrast the ease with which some students critiqued the entire romance genre, with the reluctance with which they had criticized other novels earlier in the semester. It occurred to me that next time I might have students read two shorter romances, but completely different ones, to short circuit this tendency.
Several students lamented the lack of gravity in the novel. They felt, not that the novel had to end tragically, but that more had to be at stake, in order to make it a great novel. They noted that the one time David’s hijinks actually work to pry Min and Cal apart, after Min’s sister’s disaster of a non-wedding, Cal goes home and his next door neighbor, Shanna, explains to him (correctly) exactly what happened why it happened, and what he must do to fix it. Cal believes her almost instantaneously, so there is never any real danger to the relationship. To give another concrete example, one student a female, noted the discussion about “fairy tales” Min had with her best friend Bonnie after The Black Moment was “kind of lame… I mean, she wants to be a soccer mom. You can have anything you want, and this is all you want?” Along these lines, one student lamented that “people would rather read a predictable ‘feel good’ story than a piece of writing that tries to say something new or expands on an idea.” Another referred to Bet Me in terms from an earlier essay, as an “emotional pep pill.”
Many students expressed dislike of the “lack of realism” in the novel. Looking back at my Gaffney post, I see this was a major issue for my students in 2009, and I hereby berate myself for not being more prepared for it. Among the unrealistic elements of the novel are (a) coincidences (too many to mention, but the one where Cal and Min end up together at the same late night showing of a film was singled out for special criticism, as well as Cal finding Min’s missing snow globe), (b) the feral cat that bonds to Min, attacks David, and bonds to Cal, while also knowing how to turn on the stereo and play Elvis tunes, (c) the sex (one set of fireworks was ok, but every single time they kiss? As one student put it, “no one’s success rate is that high.”)
One particular student happened to be wearing an Iron Man t-shirt as he criticized the lack of realism in the novel. I could not help but point this out. He, and some others, responded that (a) the Marvel universe is more realistic than a romance novel, especially the character interactions and dialogue, and (b) the stakes are so much higher in Marvel that the lack of realism is not as bad. I didn’t push them on it, but I was not convinced.
A couple of students deliberately read Bet Me through the lens of the fantasy genre. As one student put it, “Fantasy novels deal with our fantasies about adventure and magic, about slaying dragons and freeing kingdoms. Romance novels, from reading Bet Me, seem to deal with fantasies of the heart. They are almost as unrealistic, but also almost as harmless.” Another said, “The breakthrough for me was comparing it to the fantasy genre I love.”
Of the students who were complimentary, several said things along the lines of “this is not a romance novel.” Since I had given them three definitions of the romance novel the prior week (Cawelti, RWA, and Regis), any of which work for this novel, I found this type of comment surprising. What they were saying, I think, is that it was not what they expected. In particular, Min, being self-sufficient, smart, perhaps stronger than Cal, resistant (at first) to his charms, and determinedly child-free, surprised them. They also expected a “hot girl falling for a hot babe” narrative. One student said that the novel is “teaching girls to be unique”, while another said Crusie’s target audience is “people who feel marginalized by social image of the ideal woman.”
One thing that really took me by surprise was how much the students enjoyed the scenes with Cal’s family, and even Min’s to some extent. I always learn from my students, and I learned this time that Cal’s relationship with Bink was very important as it provided a counter-narrative to Cynthie’s explanation of his tendency to serially date. Students also really enjoyed the dinner scene at Cal’s house. For my part, I tend to find the parental dinner scenes, in this book, and in other Crusie novels like Strange Bedpersons, completely “unrealistic” set pieces Designed to Do Something. But my students really preferred the second half of the novel, and the development of Cal’s character.
There was universal agreement that Cal grew as a person, but the class was more mixed about Min. One student felt that Min was objectified, and ended up objectifying herself, for example, wearing the red lace her mother bought her when she first kissed Cal. Rather than seeing Cal’s attraction to Min as a triumph, this (male) student felt that Cal was constantly objectifying Min, and teaching her to objectify herself, conforming to her mother’s expectation that she dress up more to attract a handsome man and get married. We had a good long discussion about this point. On the issue of Min’s weight, some students (female) strongly identified with it, while others (male and female) felt that Min’s fat was fetishized in a way that made them uncomfortable. The scene at the picnic when Min exchanges bites of a Krispy Kreme donut for Cal’s lips, saying “more”, was singled out in this context. Another student wondered whether Min’s character arc had to be shorter because Crusie didn’t want to conform to stereotypes of the genre and start with a weak heroine.
Several students noted the high level of genre savviness of the characters. They introduced me to a term, lampshading, defined here by Tv Tropes:
Lampshade Hanging is the writers’ trick of dealing with any element of the story that threatens the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief — whether a very implausible plot development, or a particularly blatant use of a trope — by calling attention to it… and then moving on. In simple terms – the author points out the improbable subject through some medium (character, passerby, narration, etc.) and says it exists regardless of logic. The reason for this counter-intuitive strategy is two-fold. First, it assures the audience that the author is aware of the implausible plot development that just happened, and that they aren’t trying to slip something past the audience. Second, it assures the audience that the world of the story is like Real Life: what’s implausible for you or me is just as implausible for these characters, and just as likely to provoke an incredulous response.
Min and Cal’s dialogue after the lights come up and they find themselves in the same theater, Cal finding Min’s missing snow globe, and in general secondary characters’ tendency to say exactly what the reader might be thinking about the improbable events unfolding, are examples. In other cases, we had Playing with Tropes, such as the Discussed Trope, as when the Cinderella story is discussed.
Overall, I was really delighted with our class discussions, and felt students had a lot of interesting things to say about Bet Me. Some things I haven’t even had time to mention are the ethics concerns over the bet, and over Cynthie’s determination to write about her relationship with Cal. I think this worked much better than the Gaffney and will likely use it again next year.
There’s lots more I could say, but this post is already too long. One last comment I wanted to make about the discussion, and the class in general, was the way Twilight, the books and films, hung over the course. At one point I jokingly banned Twilight references. I may have to assign that one next time, too, just to get it out of everyone’s system. I’m kidding. Sort of.
Eloisa James’ Keynote for the McDaniel Popular Romance Conference
The keynote address for the conference Popular Romance in the New Millennium was given by Mary Bly, English Professor at Fordham University, whose research focuses on early modern drama. Bly is better known in the romance community as Eloisa James, NYT bestselling author.
The first night of the conference began with champagne and french fries. Pam Regis, conference host, told everyone that the fries were in honor of Nora Roberts, whose donation to McDaniel College made the conference possible. Roberts once said that “a day without french fries is like a day without an orgasm”, which explains the name of one of Roberts’ online fan communities, ADWOFF.
What follows are my notes, which are not complete. It’s impossible to convey things like transitions and a sense of the whole via hastily scribbled notes. I’ve tried to convey not just the words, but the sense of the words, and I made sure my summary meshed with Tweets from others who were there, but I’m fallible, so any corrections from folks who were there are appreciated. You can check out the hashtag on Twitter, #mcdromance, and read Smart Bitch Sarah Wendell’s reflections on the conference, here.
James began with the point that things are in flux, in scholarship, the genre, and in publishing. She noted that she chaired the committee for the RWA academic research grant for several years, and has seen the growth of romance scholarship across the globe. The genre is so mutable it is hard to write about. (later in the talk she name checked Suzanne Brockmann for doing interesting things with the novel.)
At the same time, book stores are disappearing. She heard that Sams/Walmart plans to cut romance entirely in the next year. Erotica and romance are now published under same imprint with same covers, making it hard to tell the difference. When the RWA President was on the TV program Cake Boss Food Network Challenge (Season 12, Episode 5), she insisted that a romance novel can’t have a married couple on the cover, which shows how fast the genre changes.
[Edited to add. I've just watched the episode.
Bearing in mind that reality TV heavily edits everyone, here is what RWA President Dorien Kelly actually said about the cake with a married couple: "You have a couple who are married as the story progresses. That's unusual in romance novels these days, because the happily ever after is perceived as that moment, not necessarily where they're married, but you know it's all going to wrap up happily ever after." Contestant's response: "Gimme a break."]
James said that squabbling over boundaries is a waste of time. The genre is about the secret architecture of life. At the heart of this maze is love.
James emphasized the importance of being precise in our scholarship. She gave an example of an essay on vampire romance published this year which uses examples willy nilly as if the vampire genre has not changed since 2000. Even within one series, such as Christine Feehan’s or Thea Harrison’s the rules change. She recommends tying our analyses to a decade or a five year span.
[These comments made me glad I decided to stick to one subgenre and one decade for my own paper!]
The same is true of “patriarchy.” It’s important to recognize that “the patriarchy” is different from place to place, time to time. Must be precise, study the parts, not the parameters and the whole. We have moved beyond that. We can’t miss the trees for the forest.
The same is true of historical narratives: if they are not accurate, we must ask how not and why not. Bodice rippers were fun to read in the eighties. Leg warmers were fun to wear. We need to be aware of culture and history of sex. Yet the sex she writes is not “historically accurate” — it is for today’s readers. We write sex from the point of view of our contemporary mores and attitudes.
So we must keep two viewpoints: one is the author, the other is specific cultural moment in which book was written.
James was amazed to see her books cited by scholars who didn’t bother to visit her website or shoot her a question via email. She says the part of writing that risks getting lost in scholarship is the writer.She cites Salman Rushdie, and I am not 100% sure this passage from Is Nothing Sacred? is what she means, but I think it conveys the gist:
What draws us to an author is his or her “unlikeliness,” even if the apparatus of literary criticism then sets to work to demonstrate that he or she is really no more than an accumulation of influences. Unlikeness, the thing that makes it impossible for a writer to stand in any regimented line, is a quality novelists share with the Caped Crusaders of the comics, though they are only rarely capable of leaping tall buildings in a single stride.
What is more, the writer is there, in all his work, in the reader’s hands, utterly exposed, utterly defenseless, entirely without the benefit of an alter ego to hide behind. What is forged, in the secret act of reading, is a different kind of identity, as the reader and writer merge, through the medium of the text, to become a collective being that both writes as it reads and reads as it writes, and creates, jointly, that unique work, “their” novel. This “secret identity” of writer and reader is the novel form’s greatest and most subversive gift.
[in the Q&A, when Sarah Frantz suggested that knowing that Suzanne Brockmann has a gay son and is an advocate for GLBTQ rights makes it easier to understand some themes in her work, James clarified that she is not advocating biographical criticism.]
James goes on to discuss reader response to her books. She says that when she writes about events that have occurred in her own life: a difficult pregnancy, a spouse’s cardiac event — there is a “bedrock of truth” that readers, especially readers who have experienced similar events (or at least the same emotions), find “raw and real and moving.” Romance novels live or die on strong emotions.
Yet books that seem fascinatingly similar are also deeply different. She doesn’t believe genre parameters are in themselves limiting to an author. Read in terms of genre, Hamlet, for example, is a thriller, a series of questions. And readers create their own novels, or rewrite the novels, by reading them.
Another change in the industry is that authors are now the brand that matters, not the publisher or the line. Increasingly, social media seems to drive sales. She has noticed how important her number of Facebook and Twitter followers is to publishers. But where publishers see dollars, writers see exhaustion.
James also said the genre is only, at one level, individual books. She drew on both popular culture and poetry as inspiration for the protagonists When Beauty Tamed the Beast. House, M.D. inspired aspects of the heroine’s character, and Eliot’s Prufrock inspired aspects of the hero’s.
Reflections on the McDaniel Popular Romance Conference Part 1
I’ve just returned from the conference, Popular Romance in the New Millennium, hosted at McDaniel College and coordinated by Pamela Regis, professor of English and author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel. I traveled with my friend and copresenter, a member of the English faculty at my uni, which was a first for me. She works on romantic era novels, especially Minerva Press novels, which were written by and read by women. She wasn’t sure what to expect from a popular romance conference, but I’m pleased to report she had, as I did, an amazing time, and plans to incorporate several suggestions into her own teaching.
This post is not a thorough report, but a collection of subjective and impressionistic notes. For more information about the conference, check Teach Me Tonight, and have a look at the #mcdrom hastag on twitter, to which Sarah Frantz, Sarah Wendell, and several others contributed throughout the event.
The conference began on Thursday morning when Amy Burge, a PhD candidate at York University in Women’s Studies (the setting of the 2012 IASPR conference), presented a Harlequin workshop to Pam Regis’s students and several conference attendees. I wasn’t there, but click here to see a short video. Amy took pages from Harlequin books (such as Kindred Spirits, by Cindy Victor (1986), and An Ideal Match by Sandra Field (1987)) and cut them up into words, magnetic poetry style. Students received the intact page and a collection of words, and were asked to rearrange them.
The next day, Amy presented on her experience running these workshops. Her analysis was detailed and coherent, but I’ll just mention a couple of random points. She described feminist, queer, and sadomasochistic reworkings of the texts. Many participants reacted against the perceived misogyny in the text, one of them creating a gender reversal in which the hero was vulnerable and needy. Yet, despite shifting around pronouns, the student kept a reference to the male character’s “long fingers”, so the text retains a nonreversed, gender conforming element.
One student turned a scene into an angsty lesbian love poem. And yet another managed to rewrite the text to have one female character fisting another. Although there was a sense that a lesbian BDSM scene is as far from romance as it is possible to get, Amy pointed out that the themes of dominance and submission are very salient to the genre, so that this was not as radical a formulation as it might at first appear.
Amy noted that sometimes students, expecting misogyny in a Harlequin romance novel, actually read misogyny into the text when it was absent.
For Amy, the most significant finding of the workshops was the potential they have to encourage students to think of themselves as engaged readers and critics of romance.
The next speaker on the panel was Glinda Hall of Arkansas State. I had met Glinda once before at the 2009 PCA conference, and Elizabeth and I spent a lot of time with her over the conference, talking pedagogy and romance. In 2010, Glinda taught a course, Beyond Heaving Bosoms: Women’s Popular Romance Fiction, at University of Arkansas. Glinda learned quickly that the issue of sex was the elephant in the room, and that they could not do a good job of talking about the books until she had equipped herself with some tools to address the sexual issues in the books. She emphasized that sex is everywhere in literature, not just in romance fiction, and that learning how to teach about sex in a literature classroom is vital.
In the Q and A, the question of discomfort was raised (Glinda teaches a wide range of romance fiction in the course, including erotic BDSM romance The Velvet Glove, by Emma Holly), and most participants agreed that some discomfort is appropriate in the learning environment.
Perhaps it is because my students in Ethics and Fiction and I just worked through the article by Peter J. Rabinowitz, “On Teaching The Story of O. Lateral Ethics and the Conditions of Reading”, but I was thinking mostly about the fact that the classrooms themselves are a minisociety, into which we bring all of the oppressions that exist in our society. I hardly think teachers should shy away from difficult or sexually explicit material, but we live in a society in which male on female rape is a constant threat and common occurrence, where women’s sexuality is constructed to repress and repel rather than free, and in which disability and sex, to take just one example, is erased. My point is that oppressive dynamics can very easily be — and usually are – replicated in the classroom, such that each student may not be similarly situated with respect to sexual politics. This is not much different from teaching racial issues in Huckleberry Finn, of course, and no more an excuse to avoid sexually explicit material in the classroom than it is to avoid racially explicit material. Anyway, many of my own thoughts along these lines were summed up by author Kathleen Gilles Seidel, who reminded us that there is a difference between being uncomfortable and being unsafe, and we must always create a safe classroom.
Glinda reported that several of her students began to recognize unexplored sexual themes in literary texts in their other classes, and asked their professors why they weren’t discussed. So the reverberations were significant throughout the curriculum.
Ok, this is a long enough post. I hope some readers find this interesting. Of course, any omissions or errors are mine, and I am happy to be corrected if I got any of this wrong. Just comment below or, if you prefer, email me at jessica@readractreview.com.
More later!
Jean-Paul Sartre on Writing and Reading
Some passages from Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Why Write?” (1947) which we are discussing in Ethics and Fiction tomorrow.
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“… the literary object is a peculiar top which exists only in movement. To make it come into view a concrete act called reading is necessary, and it lasts only as long as this act can last.”
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“It is the joint effort of author and reader which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except by and for others.”
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“You are perfectly free to leave that book on the table. But once you open it, you assume responsibility for it.”
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“… the characteristic of aesthetic consciousness is to be a belief by means of commitment, by oath, a belief sustained by fidelity to one’s self and to the author, a perpetually renewed choice to believe. I can awaken at every moment, and I know it; but I do not want to; reading is a free dream.”
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“… reading is a pact of generosity between the author and reader. Each one trusts the other; each one counts on the other, demands of the other as much as he demands of himself.”
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You can read the entire essay here (link opens a PDF)
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And here he is with Simone de Beauvoir in 1947:
The November Blogging Plan
It’s been a busy week or so, as the lack of posts will attest. I’ve got three presentations next week, one at Hospice on ethics in hospice volunteering, one at the hospital on ethical issues in caring for the obese patient, and the big one, my presentation with a fellow professor at the Popular Romance in the New Millennium conference (that one’s in Maryland). I’ve been trying to get going on those talks, but keep getting sidetracked by consult calls, my son’s soccer team’s inability to lose (and thus continued participation in the state soccer cup tournament), and, truth be told, Twitter.
Nonetheless, I’d like to try to blog *something* so I thought I would try to do some bullets every day, talking about what I’ve been up to in the classroom, reading, writing etc. Nothing too onerous, for me or for you. I am definitely hoping to blog some of the McDaniel conference.
Here goes:
1. My Ethics and Fiction class continues to be outstanding. We had a wonderful discussion of the ethics of teaching Huckleberry Finn, which I hope to blog about at some length, and I assigned a short story by William Henry Lewis, “I Got Somebody in Staunton” for the next class period (here’s a link to the NYT review of the collection). Although there is no replicating the richness of a racially diverse group, I was astounded at how strongly my all-white class responded to the Staunton piece. It’s the story of a black professor who is driving to visit his ailing uncle and decides to give a lift to a white girl he meets in a bar. If I list out the action elements, nothing much happens. But the protagonist’s racial consciousness, shaped by his uncle, makes every new paragraph feel like a hate crime waiting to happen. It made a huge (positive) impression on my students, and gave us a way to bring some of the racial issues from Twain forward. I’m a little dejected about my 100, so this is a nice balance.
2. I’ve been reading romance novels in which the heroine is an author, often a romance novelist, for my project on authorship. One of those was Julie Leto’s Brazen and Burning, a 2003 Harlequin Temptation. In this one, Sydney is a romance writer who has made it to the top of her field. She’s all about casual sex, and has left behind a string of broken hearts. She decides (for no reason, really, which is one issue I had with the book) it is time to pursue the one man who might have been worth a real commitment. Alas, she learns that he has been hit by a car and has amnesia! He finds her attractive, but cannot recall their relationship. Isn’t that a great plot? This is a good one for my project, because Sydney uses her romance writer smarts to cope with obstacles in her relationship with Adam. She’s completely confident in every way and I enjoyed the heck out of this little book.
3. Okay, you have heard about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and maybe even NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). But a new one on me is AcBoWriMo. Think you can write an academic book in a month? Actually, you can set your own goals. What is it about November that we are supposed to be so productive this month? Anyway, I think I am going to try the daily blogging thing. Anyone care to join me?
4. My friend took me shopping last weekend. Occasionally, my friends take pity on me and do this sort of thing. I discovered Chico’s Travelers clothing. Oh my god! So flowy and comfortable and I can eat all the Halloween candy I want and still wear it. Hell, I could be 8 months pregnant and still wear this stuff. I bought this stuff, so if you see someone with crazy eyes and a red and black outfit next week, it’s me. However, my fashion forward friend couldn’t get me to replace my ancient Danskos… that I got as hand me downs … in 2005 … from my 75 year old mom … that I fell asleep in front of the wood stove wearing … and melted the tops off of … yet still wear.
5. I joined Pinterest. I have no idea why and doubt it will take (i.e. it will go the way of Facebook, Librarything, Goodreads, Tumblr, and Goggle+ in the pantheon of my failed digital experiments). I know this is not exactly an enticing intro to my pins (pin board?s), but if you are on it, feel free to friend me. Or pin me. Or whatever.
More tomorrow!