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Ethical Criticism of Genre Fiction (Part 2)

Jun 3

Posted by Jessica in Pop Culture Association 2010 | 13 Comments

This is a sketch of a project I am working on, and of a paper I gave at the Popular Culture Association conference in April. Part 1 is here. Part 3 to come.

I. In Part 1 I argued that ethical criticism is not about rating books for how well they provide moral education. That view, known as instrumentalism, reduces the role of art to handmaiden of morality.  As a reaction to instrumentalism, aestheticism claims that there is no connection between art and morality. Oscar Wilde’s comment that “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” is the classic example of aestheticsm. It turns out that aestheticism has its own reductionist problems, which become clear once one considers how to keep morality out of an evaluation of any novel that attempts to deal seriously with moral matters.

So ethical criticism tries to steer clear of the faults of both instrumentalism (aka moralism) and aestheticism (aka autonomism). Different ethical critics have cashed out the relationship in different ways. Here are a couple of contenders:

a. Noel Carroll: “clarificationism” : The idea here is that don’t gain new moral knowledge, especially not in the form of propositional knowledge, but rather that art works have to engage their audience, and to do this they have to “fit” them. The audience has to mobilize its knowledge, including moral knowledge, and its emotions, in order to experience the work. This is especially true with respect to mass art, which has to be accessible.

Narrative art deepens our moral understanding by encouraging us to apply our moral understanding to specific cases. It forces us to move from knowledge to understanding (ability to application). When we read fiction, we connect different parts of our “moral knowledge stock”. Fiction thus exercises and enlarges our moral understanding.

Just understanding the narrative often requires exercising our moral powers. So reading a novel just is a continuous process of moral judgment. This is not a “consequence” or “result” of reading. It is reading. It is not going outside the work. It is of the work.

b. Martha Nussbaum: “virtue ethics”:  Martha Nussbaum has argued that engagement with fiction can cultivate certain highly cognitive moral abilities related to attention, attunement, and discernment, including the ability to notice morally relevant details, empathy, and the ability to better understand complicated moral issues. In discussing James’ The Golden Bowl, she writes:

[T]his novel calls upon and also develops our ability to confront mystery with the cognitive engagement of both thought and feeling. To work through these sentences and these chapters is to become involved in an activity of exploration and unraveling that uses abilities, especially abilities of emotion and imagination, rarely tapped by philosophical texts. (Nussbaum 1990, 143)

Nussbaum has certain goals in mind that have more to do with moral philosophy than art criticism. Her arguments about the moral importance of literature have a lot to do with her development of a neo-Aristotelian ethic. She thinks that morality is less about universal principles and more about human flourishing and the capacities needed to do so. In making that kind of claim, she situates herself as part of a later twentieth century philosophical take on morality that emerged as a critique (some would say antidote) to the abstract formalism that had dominated moral philosophy for a long time.  My own views on moral philosophy have been shaped mostly by this tradition.

Nussbaum actually says that fiction itself can be moral philosophy, and can be better moral philosophy than what you find in philosophy journals. This is because fiction captures the elements of moral life that an Aristotelian sees as most important, like character, emotion, and visions of the good, while traditional ethics essays remain at a level of abstraction – even their example of ethical dilemmas tend to be schematic and far fetched — that bears no resemblance to how moral deliberation actually works.

Nussbaum has interesting things to say about the inseparability of form and content. James isn’t just Aristotle dressed up with pretty images that you can remove like ornaments on a Christmas tree and have the essence left over. You can’t summarize or paraphrase any passage in fiction and hope to keep the same meaning, the way you can with a philosophical argument.

There are a number of other takes on ethical criticism, of course. I just give these as examples of kinds of ethical criticism that are more intelligent and compelling than those that seek to glean nuggets of moral lessons from books and throw out every thing else.

Note that for ethical critics, active reading is assumed. Carroll in particular emphasizes the way readers must fill in gaps in the narrative with their own stock of knowledge. Narrative also calls for us to feel certain emotions. If we don’t, we simply cannot understand the text.

II. What exactly do ethical critics evaluate?

This seems obvious: the book. But what is that?

Here’s my view (not unique to me. It’s from arguments found in Alexander Nehamas for example, and others, like Seymour Chatman)

I don’t know how to read a novel other than as someone trying to tell me a story. It is natural to posit a rational agent when we read a book. We assume the text is organized in a certain way for certain reasons. We realize we can find all of these words elsewhere but they are here, together, in a specific purposeful arrangement. More, the text is for us, the readers. We are engaging with someone who is deliberately engaging with us, aesthetically, morally, politically, cognitively. I think that positing an author is just part of what reading is. It is not some extra psychological effort readers may or may not undertake. The idea of a purpose leads naturally to the idea of an agent. But who is that? It isn’t the narrator or the protagonist, because the first can be unreliable, and the second is limited in understanding (her point of view may not be the only one we get).

The writer is the individual person who writes the book. But that’s not who I am thinking about when I review a book or do ethical criticism. You can tell because I make claims about the text and not about the flesh and blood writer. (Wayne Booth has a set of terms for this, as do others. Booth calls it the “implied author”. For Nehamas is it just the “author”. ). There are probably lots of things that go into the writing from the writer’s standpoint that, in caring deeply about the text, I do not care about — like that she needed to finish this book to make a mortgage payment or that the name of the protagonist came from the name of her best friend in first grade.

So the “author” (or “implied author” or “posited author”) is a fiction, with one main function: to allow us to read the text as purposive.

It follows that in ethical criticism, moral judgments are made about the literary work, i.e. about the author, not about the writer. In my experience on this blog, this can be a challenging distinction for some authors to grasp. And in some ways I don’t blame them: it is a very tight circle indeed. (The reader constructs the author, but the author constructed the narrator, so does the reader construct the narrator, and thus the text, too? Something has gone awry.) Are we just adding agents when we would do well to stick with 2 —  the narrator and the writer? Luckily, I don’t have to solve this problem to get to my main point. I just wanted to let you know I know it exists.

For my purposes, all we need is some conceptual space between the flesh and blood writer and the posited or implied author, enough so that when we make moral judgments about the text, we are not seen as making, mutatis mutandis, moral judgments about the flesh and blood writer.

Why am I spending time on this? I think it is because I am coming at this as a reader of genre fiction, and genre fiction is different from literary fiction in the closeness of its readers, who may aptly be called “fans”, to the authors. The question of the relationship between writers and readers is there in literary criticism, but it has special resonance for genre readers because of the relative closeness of genre writers to their readers in comparison to literary writers.

III. The relation of the moderate moralists’ theories to genre fiction.

I teach a course in philosophy and fiction, particularly ethics and fiction. I have read a lot of ethical criticism. And most of it –almost all of  it, really — is criticism of “literature”, and not just literature but the “classics”.  (And not just the classics, but a mini-canon of works, as I explain below). Here I am mainly referring to philosophers who write about ethical criticism. (Also, I am using the terms “literature” and “genre fiction” in their loose and popular senses. I am not, in doing so, necessarily buying in to invidious distinctions between them, least of all to an invidious distinction between their relative literary merits.)

So we are finally at the central motivating question of the paper: What is the relationship of our best known philosophical champions of ethical criticism to genre fiction? And is that relationship contingent or necessary (that is, do they just pick the classics because that’s what they happen to read or like, or do they not pick genre fictionspecifically because they believe that ethical criticism of genre fiction doesn’t merit ethical criticism in some sense?)

a. Nussbaum, like most philosophers who engage with literature, focuses exclusively on the classics, especially Henry James. She does not engage with genre fiction at all.
b. Booth – As an aside, I will say that I have problems with his theory overall, as it comes very close to moralism — not moderate moralism — about literature. But the moralism is most noticeable when he is talking (which he rarely does) about genre fiction. For example, Booth worries about “what [Stephen] King’s 300 million sold copies have taught the world’s unsophisticated readers”, and when challenged on whether he has actually read even one of King’s books, he says in a footnote: “I’ve tried to.”

This is a very common tendency: to use literary classics are exemplars of salutary moral effects and genre fiction as exemplars of potentially corrosive moral effects. It’s quite amazing, really. I mean, would you take your lessons on father/daughter relations from The Golden Bowl, as Nussbaum suggests? Squicks me right the heck out.

But Booth — unlike most others in this group — at least tackles head on the question of what kind of books work best for ethical criticism. And here’s what he says:

i. Using Sheldon Sacks’s typology of authorial invitation – satire, apologue (idea novels) and action novels, in which category Booth includes “novels like those of Jane Austen or Cormac McCarthy or, moving down the line in quality, Agatha Christie or Louis L’Amour”. He notes that that writers of action novels get “furious” when ethical critics focus on their work, because “for them, it is the beautifully formed action, conveyed in beautiful or witty or original style” that counts. “Consign the ethicists to hell, where they belong” so the authors of action novels are purported to say. My own view is that such authors are probably sick unto death of critics using genre fiction as an ethical punching bag.

But it is not just the authors’ faults: Booth claims without argument that action stories do not openly demand ethical criticism. This is very interesting to me, since actions — and the people who take them — are the natural subjects of moral judgment.

For Booth, the most important literary kind for ethical criticism “has no label” –”it engages us in serious thought about ethical matters, based on the reinforcement of certain ethical positions as admirable and others as questionable or indefensible, but also hooks us into plots of conflict that are inseparable from that thinking” (note that he implies action stories do not do this). His example of such writing? Henry James. (From “Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple”, Style, 1998).
ii. In his earlier (1988) book, The Company We Keep,  Booth offered a list of passages written by…

God

Ford Maddox Ford

DH Lawrence,

Barbara Cartland

Penthouse

I am guessing the order of this list tells us in no uncertain terms what he thinks of the ethics of romance novels. Booth allows that all of these texts claim to offer the reader something (his model is of the implied author as a friend, a friend who is always offering the reader something via the text). He writes:

The simple and obvious question, for example, ‘Do you, my would be friend, wish ME well, or will you be the only one to profit if I join you?’ can make the implied creators of the Cartland romance and the Penthouse garbage writhe with embarrassment.

When he says, in a footnote, that “almost any of the literary classics could for most readers be said to provide the kind of friendship we are celebrating”, he is at his clearest.

c. Carroll, who has done important work on horror, comedy, film, and on mass art  in general (The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart, New York, Routledge, 1990, A Philosophy of Mass Art, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998), is, not surprisingly, an important counterexample. He is explicit that Harlequin romances (despite being a “more mundane example”, contrasted with a “special case” like Citizen Kane) “can engage our imaginative and reflective powers.”

Yet, even someone like Carroll, who defends the potential of ethical criticism of mass art, tends, in his examples of morally significant narratives, to rely on literary fiction. And his examples of morally obfuscating fiction tend to be from genre works  – for example, when he singles out Silence of the Lambs and Pulp Fiction, both of which “encourage us to forge an emotive link” between gayness and horror. I am not claiming he is wrong about those films — he makes a persuasive case, actually –  just noticing where the chips tend to fall when philosophers are mining for examples of ethically bad art.

IV. Textbooks

You can tell a lot about the commitments of a field of study by looking at textbooks.

There are a few popular ethics textbooks that use literature as a source of  examples. (I would never use them. I don’t like making literature the handmaiden of philosophy.) These focus heavily on the classics. So, for example, in The Moral of the Story: An Anthology of Ethics Through Literature, the chapter on “Love and Marriage” has selections from:

Jane Austen (PP)

Leo Tolstoy (AK),

Shakespeare (R&J)

George Bernard Shaw

Daniel Defoe (Moll Flanders)

Guy de Maupassant (“The Model”)

John Cleland (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure).

When it comes to ethical dilemmas in love and sex, wouldn’t you think contemporary romance is the obvious place to start? But there is very little genre fiction among dozens of selection in the entire textbook.

ii. Ethics, Literature, and Theory. This is the book I used in Ethics and Fiction, and it is very good, but it makes use of all the usual suspects. At this point there is a mini-canon in ethical criticism of Huckleberry Finn, Beloved, To Kill a Mockingbird, anything by Henry James, Frankenstein, anything by Joyce or Flaubert, etc. We can’t explain this by pointing out that philosophers chose them because they can ssume audience familiarity, because can’t they also assume audience familiarity with Harry Potter, or The Godfather, or Gone with the Wind, or Miss Marple? Not insignifiantly, in this collection, genre fiction gets the most attention in a section on writers’ responsibilities.

iii. There is one popular intro to ethics textbook, The Moral of the Story: An introduction to ethics through literature, which is a bit misleadingly titled, as the majority of its narratives are actually popular film narratives. But when it uses fiction, it tends to be literary fiction.

Summing up this section, ethical critics tend to focus almost exclusively on literary fiction.  I think we should turn at least some of our ethical attention to genre fiction, especially romance. In the next part I will say more about why we should, about why that idea may not be enthusaistically embraced by all genre writers, and also about the difference genre makes in ethical criticism.

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Ethical Criticism of Genre Fiction Part 1 (my PCA Paper)

Apr 28

Posted by Jessica in Pop Culture Association 2010 | 7 Comments

Part 1 of a multipart post.

For newbies: this is part one of a summary of a paper I gave at the Popular Culture Association annual meeting in April 2010, with some additional commentary.

I. In what ways can an artwork be ethically evaluated? There are several ways:

    i. in its mode of production (for example, the business of publishing, or ethics of writing)
    ii. the ethical views or attitudes it endorses or rejects
    iii. in the quality of its exploration of ethical issues
    iv. in its consequences (for example, causing readers to accept morally salutary or problematic attitudes)

I am interested in iii and ii

I spent a lot of time in this presentation defending the general idea of ethical criticism, because I was talking to a roomful of romance scholars and readers. Romance readers are used to iv above. The majority of public discourse about the romance novel does not treat it as literature or even as subliterature but as a commercial pop cultural product. More specifically, it has focused on the romance novel as a potentially harmful, singular product (and even my locution there — “the romance novel” — evidences that). As a romance reader, I am aware that this is a sensitive issue, for good reason, so I wanted to take time to explain exactly what I propose to do when I propose to engage in the ethical criticism of romance novels.

For me, as a moral philosopher, ethical criticism of the romance novel is the tiny part I can contribute to taking romance novels seriously as novels. It is also the tiny part I can contribute to broadening the very narrow focus among ethical critics on certain set of literary works.

II. Assuming we also evaluate literature aesthetically, what is the relationship between ethical and aesthetic evaluation?

I am only interested in this question to the extent of ruling out any answer that forecloses the possibility of ethical criticism per se.

a. Autonomism –Ex. Richard Posner, Oscar Wilde: art and morality are entirely separate, irrelevant to one another. No art is subject to moral assessment. Moral value or disvalue has no impact on value of art work. Art is valuable because it is “absorbing” or “singular” or more generally “beautiful”,  or some other aesthetic quality. 

b. Platonism – all art is morally suspect (this has to do with Plato’s onotlogy. Just its distance from the really real, i.e. the Forms, makes art ontologically suspect.)

c. Utopianism – Ex. Herbert Marcuse — all art is morally uplifting (for example, because it shows the world as it might be, supports praxis); Ex. Sartre, who write that there could be no good novel endorsing slavery (like Plato, Sartre has complicated ontological reasons of this view)

III. Problems with these:

As Noel Carroll has pointed out, all of these theories hold a “common denominator thesis”, namely that all art has same relationship to morality (whatever that relationship is). It seems more likely that different instances and kinds of art have different relationships to ethics. For example, while Marcuse may be right that some art has a utopian moment, few would agree that Triumph of the Will, despite its excellent aesthetic qualities, shares that. To say, as Posner and Wilde do, that there is no relationship also seems false, when so much art has been produced explicitly for religious, political and ethical reasons. Art is of the world and the world is political, religious, ethical.

Posner is right that art doesn’t have to have a moral dimension to succeed as art. Nor is art an instrument of morality. Moral edification is just not the function of most good art.

Also, looking at art ethically doesn’t foreclose or distort appreciating its aesthetic qualities, unless we let it. For one thing, aesthetic and ethical qualities are often hard to separate, in part because one of the things that can make a work of art absorbing, asethetically, is the way it engages the moral life of the audience. Can you really say you understand Beloved or Huckleberry Finnif you don’t have a handle on ii and iii above? No one, or at least no one I take seriously, is endorsing reading a book only for its moral message (extracting nuggets of moral wisdom), construed in very blunt nonaesthetic terms. Doing so would not be to read it as art, but as some kind of pedagogical tool, distorting its aesthetic qualities in the process.

When many people hear “ethical criticism of fiction”, they think immediately of looking at fiction’s effects on readers. Although there are certainly folks who do that (on both sides of the fence, i.e., some who say books are great for you morally and some who say they are bad for you morally, as we saw in Plato and Marcuse, respectively), that activity does not describe what many people are doing when they engage in ethical criticism of art. Or at least not what I am doing, and here’s why:

For one thing, what tools would you need to investigate the “effects of art”?  Many of us can recall a book that seemed to affect us profoundly, changing our world view. I think it is fair to generalize this personal observation from our armchairs, as a sort of common sense grounding  for ethical criticism or indeed any art criticism, but it is a long way from that to having any data on the effects of books on readers in general, let alone the effect of a specific book on a specific reader.

How would you gather that data, if you wanted to? Not from sitting in your office thinking about it. One way would be using the tools of social sciences like psychology and sociology, including surveys and ethnography. More newfangled ways would include using noninvasive brain imaging technologies (I can talk more about such studies if anyone wants), to see what parts of readers’ brains do what when they read. I don’t see any “ethical critics” gathering the kind of data they would need to support claims about the effects of books on readers. That is not a suggestion that they do so,  but evidence for my contention that iv above is not what ethical critics are doing (or at least not what we should be doing).

Let’s suppose for a minute that our friends in neuropsychology or sociology gathered this data. And let’s suppose it showed that Something Bad Happens when certain people read certain books. Then what? Do we immediately have a case for censorship? No. The fact that “something is bad for some people”  rarely, if ever, prompts regulation. I need only point to the example of tobacco products. At any rate, we need a new set of tools to consider this very different question, tools that literary critics and philosophers do not, generally, possess. We need our legal scholars, our political scientists, our public policy experts. So, even if someone filled the huge empirical hole where the data should be about the effects of literature on readers, we would find ourselves in another hole, that it would take lot of work to fill in.

My point is that (a) most ethical critics, at least today, are doing ii and iii, not iv above, and (b) even if we wanted to do iv above we would have a long long way to go, and a damnable time getting there.

A couple more points on this topic.  I realize that, in one sense, talk about the effects of books has always been part of literary discourse, staring with talking about the effects on the reader herself. But it is one thing to talk about how a book made you feel while reading it, and another to talk about permanent or even long term effects. It is still another thing to talk about permanent or long term effects on other readers, i.e. readers who are not you.

IV. Romance

Romance readers talk a lot about the good effects of romance reading on their beliefs, attitudes and desires. They might say reading romance has helped them to be better communicators, to understand men, to demand their due from their partners, to get in touch with their sexuality, etc. That’s cool. But if we are going to do that, we also need to consider whether romances have had any negative effects. In other words, if you are going to play the “effects on readers game” you cannot rule out a priori (for example, by saying things like “Women are not just passive readers, i.e. dopes. We know the difference between fantasy and reality. Don’t infantalize  and patronize us.”) any and all claims about negative effects on readers of romance novels. 

Consider: how could it be that you only learned good or positive things from romance novels?

There are two options, as far as I can see. (1) Romance novels, the entire genre, only endorse good positive healthy attitudes towards gender, romance, love, sex, and everything else they take as their subjects (however those good attitudes are defined). That seems manifestly unbelievable to me, given my own experience as a romance reader, and given how large and diverse the genre is. That comes close to saying there is only one romance novel – one very morally good romance novel — and it has been written over and over.

Or (2) you know quite well that there is a lot of stuff you wouldn’t endorse in a romance novel, some of it apparently endorsed by the (implied — more on that later) author, but either (a) you don’t read those books, or (b) if you do, you don’t “learn anything” from them, because you filter the bad stuff out. Ok, but then, you aren’t “learning” anything fromromance novels. Rather, you are applying a moral framework you already possess to your selection of texts, or to your reading of texts, only letting what you have already decided are “good” messages in. In that case, it would be more accurate to say that your reading of romance novels reinforces or deepens or lends specification to moral beliefs you already hold. I think that is much closer to what is really happening, personally. But if it is, then we have to accept that if a reader holds pernicious moral beliefs, she can find some warrant, some deepening, reinforcing or specifying, of those bad moral beliefs in romance novels, too.

Ok, so this post has been all about saying what I am NOT doing when I do ethical criticism. The next post will say more about what I AM doing.

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Is the Happily Ever After A Romance Imperative?

Apr 7

Posted by Jessica in Pop Culture Association 2010 | 23 Comments

Following are notes from a paper given by Phil Mathews at the Popular Culture Association Annual Meeting in St. Louis. I was not able to attend this final romance area panel, but Phil kindly provided me with a copy of his paper from which to derive a summary. I cannot promise that I’ve got everything right.

Phil Mathews is a Lecturer in Screenwriting at Bournemouth University in Dorset, England. He has degrees in fine arts and screenwriting, and his research interests are in 70s – 00s cinema, screenwriting theory, and the romance genre. He is a practicing screenwriter with credits for both film and television.

Is the Happily Ever After a Romance Imperative?

This paper will attempt to draw direct links between romance literature and film where presently there exists often conflicting definitions of genre and form. The hope is to open investigation into the form and engender further debate.

I’d like to argue that the Romance genre is stigmatised undeservedly because of the imperative for a happy ending. It is easy for critics to cast aspersions over a genre if one of the primary plot points, the ending, and with it an emotional conceit to instill or illicit joy or familiarity in its audience, is sacrosanct. It could be argued that emotional investment in a narrative is tempered when the ending is a foregone conclusion either way, positive or negative. Does a genre need to prescribe specific endings to a potentially infinite amount of stories? What does a genre hope to gain by being incalcitrant? With genres constantly in flux and their patterns, conventions and tropes sensitive to their own cultural and contemporary milieu, is it not conceivable that romances can span the depth and breadth of our capacity to experience and express notions of love in whatever form and to whatever end?

Phil compares Pam Regis’s 8 essential components of a romance novel to a leading screenwriting theorist Phil Parker’s requirements for a love story in film, noting that Parker does not require an HEA. According to Parker, even a love story which ends with the characters apart is a romance, so long as as long as the transformative value of love is upheld.

Mathews recognizes that the HEA need not be solemnized by a wedding, but he notes that two ideas are central to the HEA: (1) true love is forever or at least for the rest of the couple’s lives, and (2) there is some form of validation of the couple’s commitment to each other.

Mathews is aware that critics dismiss romance on the basis of this narrative requirement of an HEA, he feels that more is going on here than a refusal among critics to recognize that, as Regis put it, “narratives end.” He thinks it is worthwhile to ask both why critics perceive the HEA as stigmatizing, and also to ask why the HEA is perceived by readers as necessary to the genre.

Phil proceeds to discuss several films which celebrate the positive power of love and end with the promise of love, but which do not stipulate “how that commitment must or might manifest itself. ”

These include:
Good dick (2008)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2003)
Juno (2007)
Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Paper Heart (2009)
Monsters Ball (2001)

He then discusses The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009), Titanic (1997), and Ghost (1990) to suggest that “even the finality of Death need not be a barrier to the happily ever after.” He also mentions the film Love Me If You Dare (2003), in which the lovers consummate their relationship by kissing in the foundations of an office block as they are covered in wet cement. “They are literally petrified in a romantic embrace for all eternity, happily ever after.” Mathews writes.

Mathews suggests that the “cinematic resistance to betrothal” may have something to do with the greater time constraints presented by the medium, in which running times are between 90-200 minutes. He notes that some films address this issue by focusing tightly on the lead up to the betrothal and wedding, such as Meet the Parents (2000) and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002).

Mathews discusses several other kinds of love story, including star-crossed lovers (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2009), Casablanca (1942)), tragic love stories (The Separation (1994), 5×2 (2004), the Break Up (2006) and Revolutionary Road (2008)), and love stories as subplots (The Piano Teacher (2001), Leaving Las Vegas (1995), Monster (2003), Carlito’s Way (1993),The Prestige (2006)).

He concludes by asking:

Would a more inclusive view of romance conventions, able to embrace the love plot, tragic or otherwise, not serve to consolidate the genre? Is the imperative for the happily ever after the stumbling block to the potential acknowledgment of the romance genre as the most ubiquitous or universal narrative form?

PCA Romance Panel 10: The Construction of Gender: (Killer) Heroes and Heroines

Apr 4

Posted by Jessica in Pop Culture Association 2010 | 2 Comments

Following are some of my fallible, incomplete, impressionistic notes from a Romance Area panel session at the PCA conference in St. Louis. These are notes on works in progress, and do not purport to be complete records of the papers presented.  Please follow up with individual presenters for full copies of their papers or to have specific questions about their work addressed.

Romance X: The Construction of Gender: (Killer) Heroes and Heroines
Session Chair: Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University

“From Virgins to Rogues: Iris Johansen’s Ten-year Love Affair with Loveswept‖ Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University

Iris Johansen: 24 novels for Loveswept (3rd most)

“Stories of true romance and touching emotion”

Significant number of Loveswept authors made it big. Tami Hoag, Janet Evanovich, etc.

How did Loveswept compete in a crowded market? Strategy was to have authors publish under their real names. Personalize the authors, highlight the authors with bios etc.. Have authors write notes to readers. Pictures of authors in the books.

Johansen’s first book in 1983. Published 7 books in 1984 alone.

Reissues of her early work (common now of 1980s) have puzzled some fans, because she writes differently now — suspense.

Lots of very young very virginal heroines.

Question: Why is virginity so beloved by romanced readers?

Cites Jayne Ann Krentz and others here:

Virginity can only be given once, to one’s great love. Virginity adds drama and power to narrative. Changes heroine. But changes hero too.

Krentz: Heroic quality to women’s virginity throughout history of narrative

Cites author of Full Frontal Feminism on virginity.

Rogue hero [got a call and tuned out here. Sorry!] –she describes what he is like

Close textual analysis of a few IJ texts.

IJ says plot doesn’t come first, although IJ says she wish it did. For her, characters come first.

She said she was given a lot of creative license in Loveswept.

“Readers’ Perceptions of Realism, Race, and Gender in Brockmann’s Contemporary Romance Novels‖ Jim Haefner, University of St. Francis; Margaret Haefner, North Park University

Surveyed 60 undergraduate  students via online survey at surveymonkey.com, as well as focus groups

Asked about whether the respondents, who had read the books, found challenges to -isms in the heroines, heroes, their careers, and their romantic relationships

Over the Edge (sexism), Gone Too Far (racism), and Force of Nature (heterosexism and sexism)

The researchers looked for difference among students in different racial groups, between those who had women’s studies experience and those who did not, and differences between lesbian or bisexual versus heterosexual readers, but  conclude that thee were not that significant.

Readers also confirmed that Brockmann challenges sexism, racism, and heterosexism in many ways in the text.

Responses to Sam and Alyssa’s interracial relationship were all over the map, with some feeling it was totally unrealistic and others totally unremarkable. differences here as in other cases did not map onto racial identities of the readers.

“Wicked Symmetry: The Dangerous Compulsion of Attraction in Twilight and Ziska”‖ Jacob Lusk, University of North Florida; Marnie Jones, University of North Florida

[Here is a blog review of Marie Corelli's Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul, published in 1897. The Kindle edition is FREE.]

Both texts – teleological worlds.

Love and sex as identity destroyers

Bella destroys her identity for her lover, shapes herself in Edward’s likeness

Each woman exerts authority that obliterates identity, in Bella’s case her own.

Bella destroys herself, Ziska destroys Gervase

Both use sex to destroy

Bella becomes perfect when she becomes a vampire. Everything is perfect. Even the sex is better.

Neither presents a world where women and men in real human world can achieve equality

In the human realm, power was a zero sum game.

Corelli was more progressive, calling into question the idea that passion qualifies as love

Both books are sex stories, not love stories

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PCA Romance Panel 9: So Classy!: High/Low/Middle Class/Culture

Apr 4

Posted by Jessica in Pop Culture Association 2010 | 6 Comments

Following are some of my fallible, incomplete, impressionistic notes from a Romance Area panel session at the PCA conference in St. Louis. These are notes on works in progress,and do not purport to be complete records of the papers presented.  Please follow up with individual presenters for full copies of their papers or to have specific questions about their work addressed.

Romance IX: So Classy!: High/Low/Middle Class/Culture
Session Chair: Sarah S. G. Frantz, Fayetteville State University

“Something New: Resisting the Coupling Convention in Contemporary Black Romantic Film”‖ Consuela Francis, College of Charleston

She began this project in part because she had been thinking about ways to critique slash fiction without demeaning women’s reading and writing processes.

Discussion of African American literary critical history, which often links literary value with racial uplift

Critics’ idea is that these books are interventions in oppressive racial ideologies: not just love stories

Such readings are not unconvincing, as much as unsatisfying, incomplete.

Lit critic Collins refers to “The uncommon pleasure [for black women]  of knowing it is ‘all about you’” (Collins)

But contemporary AA romance and erotica provides such a space, in which it is not all that uncommon at all, in which it is all about black women’s pleasure, beauty and desire.

Long quote from Audre Lorde’s The Uses of the Erotic on what the erotic is.

Lorde’s definition refers to sexual pleasure but also to desire and pleasure of any sort that moves us closer to our truer selves and away from negation, closer to a true assessment of our lives

Need to pay more attention to the pleasure black women derive from reading romance

Black women are taught to desire anything but what they might desire on their own.

But in black romance, this is not true. It is a literary space built on narrative insufficiency of black respectability as measure of black female desire.

Something New, Brown Sugar are the two films she discusses in detail.

Today we are in a new ideological and cultural space, with our 20th and 21st century AA romance novels.

For example, maybe some black women feel good by loving white men (as in the film). Black women do this in real life. They write it. And they enjoy reading it. Let’s not lose this basic element of analysis – the pleasure of this.

Not denying there is pleasure in reading Toni Morrison novels, which she reads and enjoys, but this it is a different literary tradition and different pleasure. It doesn’t come from the uplift of the race but something else.

These are built on assumption of black freedom. It says, black women  are able to love because they are already free.

“She quoted Shakespeare!: The inclusion of highbrow literature in popular romance novels”‖
Tamara Whyte, University of Alabama

Hands out a list of relevant quotations from Victoria Alexander’s Secrets of a Proper Lady. Handout also references a list of books published in 2009 which reference  highbrow literature.

Includes Liz Carlyle, Jane Feather, Suzanne Enoch, Julia Quinn, Eloisa James, Stephanie Laurens, Olivia Drake, Melody Thomas, Jillian Hunter

She has counted 400 references to Shakespeare alone in romance novels

Some say this is just an attempt to elevate a popular genre.

She argues it demonstrates the amount of literary education the author has, and what she can presume of her audience.

It suggests a postmodern blurring of high and low culture forms.

Cites an article that suggests a preponderance of Shakespeare references in Regencies in 1980, in order to invoke Shakespeare’s cultural capital, and to set out Regency as a higher culture version of romance.

TW rejects this as a good explanation. Thinks it has more to do with acknowledging intelligence of audience.

Notes Eloisa James’s website invites readers to find literary allusions in her work, which are abundant. Clearly James thinks her readers will not only get them, but appreciate them.

Hawkins cited: it is academic tradition not literary tradition which erects boundaries between high and low.

Enriches reading experiences of both Shakespeare and romance novels.

“Neither True Nor Fair: An Exploration of Female Heroism in Popular Romance”‖
Angela Toscano, University of Utah

“Neither True nor Fair”, John Donne

Eventually she would like to ask whether we can have a antiheroine, but first need to figure out what a heroine is.

What is heroine’s narrative function within literature as whole? They lack definition.

She is not simply a female hero. She has different attributes and function.

Heroines obey secret rules.

Regis outlines rules of genre, but we also have expectations of the characters themselves

Heroine: Always beautiful and chaste

AT knows that you can find counterexamples – that’s not the point. She is trying to formulate classic understanding.

So what are beauty and chastity?

Notes tensions b/t beauty (excess) and chastity (restraint) – yet also akin. Both supposed to be pure, for example.

Explores complicated relationship between beauty and chastity.

Ex. Windflower.

So what is an antiheroine? Someone who is neither beautiful nor chaste.

This is not about taste, but about deviation of form.

Is the romance love narrative dependent on the heroine holding or acquiring beauty and chastity?

Focuses on An Unwilling Bride by Jo Beverly [I have GOT to read this!!! Like immediately. Where's my damn Kindle?]

Adheres to genres expectations and also plays with these questions.

She concludes that no, we can’t have an antiheroine.

Have to go outside genre to find antiheroine. Lucy Snow, heroine of Bronte’s  Villette is antiheroine.

[Someone suggests as antiheroine: Mary Balogh A Precious Jewel – heroine is neither chaste nor beautiful. pother remark that the hero in APJ  is kind of a second tier hero, almost as if the heroine has been punished.]

[Sela Carson, who is funny as all get out, announces that there is a whole paper to be written on hooker heroines. Also suggests, more seriously, that heroine in Covet may be a counterexample.]

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PCA Romance Panel 8: Exploring History, Genre, Media

Apr 4

Posted by Jessica in Pop Culture Association 2010 | 5 Comments

Following are some of my fallible, incomplete, impressionistic notes from a Romance Area panel session at the PCA conference in St. Louis. These are notes on works in progress,and do not purport to be complete records of the papers presented.  Please follow up with individual presenters for full copies of their papers or to have specific questions about their work addressed.

Romance VIII: Exploring History, Genre, Media
Session Chair: Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University

“American Roots of the Popular Romance Novel: Sentimental, Domestic, and Dime Novels”‖ Maryan Wherry, Black Hawk College

Some American characteristics of romance (she gives lots of textual examples from sentimental, domestic and dime store novels)

  1. Individualism and meritocracy – self made women and men, challenge social rules, etc. Act boldly, show grit
  2. Sense of class – commoners, have no servants, wealth (self made) = worth, status is earned
  3. Racial issues
  4. Lack of hereditary class means we need behavioral rules. Ex Cult of True Womanhood – piety, chastity, submissiveness, and domesticity.
  5. Ever present frontier—wildness, unsettled, conflict, “out there”; (different from “wild west” which is a particular location, whereas frontier is conflict zone between civilized and uncivilized); always that threat out there
  6. Loving to hate the romance. Longstanding, not a product of 1970s feminism. Hawthorne comments to his editor about “damned scribbling women” was directed at romance novelist.

When you look at American romances, you have to look at surrounding culture and ideologies. It is more than contingent – “it happens to be the setting” – but influences text.

“Comparison of Romance Videogames to other Romance Media”‖ Jill Astley

She reads manga and Regency romance. And plays romance video games –otome. And reads and speaks Japanese.

Her website.

Substantial niche industry in Japan. Played on PSPs, mobile phones and personal computers. Games are usually gender coded.

Substantial m/m games targeted towards women.

She will focus on games targeted to girls and woman featuring heterosexual relationships.

You can have branching storylines and multiple heroes in these games – these are 2 of the biggest differences from other romance media.

Some common tropes:

Character archetypes: hottie rich guy, sports guy, playful guy, bad boy, dependable childhood friend etc.

Often characters subvert their archetypes to keep users’ interest

Heroine dropped into unfamiliar environment, often fantasy (different time and world)

Seemingly average heroine with special quality or ability (ex. Key to magical power)

Heroine as leader of all male group (captain of space ship or ruler of continent), but often symbolic power only

Invisible heroine – player supposed to feel like she is the heroine. So heroine rarely has avatar that shows up on screen like other characters.

You could lodge same feminist criticisms of these games as of romance novels. for example, that they can be hampered by strict gender roles for the heroine.

OTOH, some are feminist in plot characterization or both. Ex. Alice in Heartland – heroine is cynical and untrusting, she doesn’t perform femininity or change personality to catch a hero.

This genre is in its infancy. Lot of growth and perhaps change to come.

“Crikey, It’s Romance for Men: Australian Sports Novels and Westerns of the 1950s‖ Toni Johnson-Woods, University of Queensland, Australia

New President of Australian/New Zealand Popular Culture Association

“Australians write crappy romance” – something a lot of folks believe.

Gothic influence of the bush infects national literature – just survival is the key, forget courting

Mateship, not courtship, is grand narrative of Australia, so one place to seek romance is mateship between 2 men

Ex. Adventures of a Squatter (19th century) – classic romance, but b/t 2 men

Silence and lack of performative speech act is central to Australian romance

1950s –sports fiction, especially boxing and horse racing – so romantic, contain all generic markers of romance Ex. Barriers Down: A Racing Romance (194?)

Working class hero, aspirational female, obstacles to overcome.

Her question: Are these romance? Answer: These are romantic in a kind of Australian way.

Ends with an Australian  joke. Man walks up to woman in a bar and asks, “Wanna root?”. She replies: “I didn’t, but now I do, you sweet talking bastard.”

“Discovering Liminal Spaces: Gossip and Self-Exposure in Jennifer Crusie’s Romances and Eighteenth-Century Amatory Fiction”‖ Kimberly Baldus, University of Missouri, St. Louis

18th century British lit is her home territory. She links that to Jennifer Crusie.

Discovery fantasies in WTT. Shifting boundaries between public and private spaces.

Liminal spaces – borderlands where things blur, concepts merge

Circulation of gossip, breaks boundaries between private and public

Crusie inverts, note Mae Wests epigraph

18th century amatory fiction, esp the secret history: sheer voyeuristic erotic fiction

Collections of lurid gossip of public figures.

Manley. New Atlantis.

Gossip as a sensual pleasure, seductive

Anticipates Crusie

Her work informed by recent theoretical approaches to gossip. They diverge – some see it as repressive, some see it as opening new territory, creating distinctive kind of social space

Gossip constrains in TML. Maddie finally rejects TML’s constraining influence.

WTT – more complicated. Respects and acknowledges power of gossip to give power.
Public and private constantly collapse – screen doors, windows, remind us of permeable boundaries – almost invite intrusions as much as provide barrier

Generic attraction to the prurient aspects of the private. Overlooked in both early 18th century and in romance criticism.

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PCA Romance Panel 7: Romancing Vampires: Toothsome Heroes and Happy Endings

Apr 3

Posted by Jessica in Pop Culture Association 2010, Vampires | Comments off

IMPORTANT NOTE:  I have disabled comments on this post deliberately.

Romance VII: Romancing Vampires: Toothsome Heroes and Happy Endings
Session Chair: Sarah S. G. Frantz, Fayetteville State University

“Sexual Exchange and Submission in Dracula: A Precursor to Gay Erotica Romance”‖ Haley Stokes

Homoerotic sexual exchange in Dracula as precursor to paranormal romance

Hard to fulfill genre requirements with two men. Tendency to write chicks with dicks, due to need for binary opposition between partners.

Conservative ideals of the genre – one partner, one true love, lifetime satisfaction with one partner  – pose unique  challenges for m/m romance.

Heteronormative space is still what is being negotiated.

Close textual analysis of Dracula, emphasizing homoeroticism of Dracula.

Story of Harker as story of bondage, homoerotic desire (cites several studies)

Dynamic of Harker and Dracula’s relationship does not require penetration, even if he wants to be bitten.

It’s about submission. Everything that happens to him in Dracula’s castle depends on the fact of his submission and his willingness/desire to submit.

Harker and Dracula experience a parody of married life that Harker is resisting. Harker cooks. Shared clothing. Etc.

Texts demonstrate a series of power exchanges stand in for sexual acts. Today, romance writers don’t have to do this.

Read Dracula as early attempt at sexual negotiation, creating a couple where the familiar binary does not exist.

“Twilight and Romeo And Juliet: The Portrayal of Love and Narrative Perspective”‖ Brent Gibson, University of Mary Hardin-Baylor

Language of Twilight puts it in tradition of the religion of love, a phrase coined by CS Lewis. Language of Christianity transferred to courtly love.

Escape v. rivalry

Escapism is fine, but if values of Christianity are taken seriously within story, love and God are rivals. One has to be subordinated to the other.

Talks about how battle between Godly and courtly love is worked out in literature of the medieval period, such as Tristan and Isolde, Troilus and Cressida, Paolo and Francesca

Continues through Renaissance, this battle between the two religions, Christianity and love.

Romeo and Juliet. This one’s a little different. They get married before consummating their love which suggests a proper subordination of religion of love to religion of God. But in other ways increases tension between two sets of values. Audience would have seen suicide as sending the victim to hell, yet they are pictured as entering paradise of lovers.

Twilight. One of many romances influenced by Romeo and Juliet and exemplifies another alteration in this tradition. Both religions are taken seriously. Not kept separate nor kept in tension. Two lovers literally idolize on another, language is very clear on this. Ex. Edward saying his lie to Bella in New Moon was “blackest kind of blasphemy”.

Meyer brings in actual religion. Edward says he is going to hell, the literal hell of Christian theology. Later he states he believes in a creator. We are told Carlyle is a Christian, he believes in God.

In Twilight, romance is elevated above religion in inversion of Medieval tactic. Ex. In Eclipse Edward agrees to make love to Bella prior to marriage, despite his earlier claim that he wouldn’t because it was the one Commandment he didn’t break. See also his views on Bella’s soul and making her a vampire.

Basically his Godly love goes out the window when Bella wants something.

Interesting that within the world of the story religion is taken seriously, and Meyer herself takes it seriously, but it is still subordinated to romance.

[A good comment on this from Margaret Toscano, Angela’s mom, who knows what she is talking about, the issue of Mormonism, and how in the Mormon version of heaven you have a big loving family,inclusive of romantic love, such that for a Mormon writer like Meyer, these two kinds of love are not so much in tension.]

“Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing: Christine Feehan’sCarpathian Heroes:”‖ Kat Schroeder, University of Washington

She wrote this paper for a class on gender studies in the media.

Who is reading the books? Younger and younger, girls as young as 10.

By age 14 reading adult series romance fiction.

Children consume media as a method to develop own views of intimate relationships in lieu of parental models.

Feehan claims all her heroines are “strong women”

CS defines strong in comparison to their male counterparts.

She focuses on full length novels where heroine started as human or believed themselves ot be human.

She describes Carpathians. Race of “not vampires”—turn into vampires unless they find their “light”, their mates.

Research Question 1 – do they reflect a relative parity of romance partners?

–age, maturity level, finances, career, sexual experience, general maturity

Research Question 11—DO novels give actual equivalent voice and agency to both the hero and heroines. Does one partner have power over the other?

Results:

Age – men much older (very funny chart here). Men b/t ages of 600-2000, women b/t age 23-27

Wealth – All but one of the women are either destitute or unemployed or the narrative doesn’t tell us; all of the men are vastly wealthy

Childhoods – all heroines had profoundly troubled childhoods while men, except one, were treasured

Sexual experience – only 3 not virgins, 2 excused by rape, 1 was widow but had marriage to a man with whom she didn’t enjoy sex

Her voice leads to his agency. Ex. She is upset, he seduces her, sometimes with force. She is angrym, he laughs.

Also TSTL heroines. Describes one heroine as being brilliant (surgeon at 18) but they aren’t (the surgeon has all the signd of being a vampire and has no idea what is happenign to her, for example. Also she jumps out a window instead of seeking help.)

Control dynamics:

–homicidal jealousy as a measure for love

–possessive controlling behaviors

                Naming convention (enfant, bebe, little one, diminutizing to a profound degree, unlike “dear”)

                In one book, Darius renames heroine, was called Rusty, he renames her Tempest. From that point forward, Feehan writes heroine from point of view of hero’s idealized version of her “Tempest”.

[Audience member notes in discussion that all of this is true in JR Ward’s BDB as well, and asks “what do we get from this?”.]

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PCA Romance Panel 6: Romance Publishing: Canadian Romance, ePublishing, and Erotica, Oh My!

Apr 2

Posted by Jessica in Pop Culture Association 2010 | 27 Comments

These are my notes from the PCA-ACA conference in 2010. Click here for contact information for the panelists in case you’d like to follow up. Please note that my notes are fallible, and attempt to communicate merely the gist of the presentations, not their entire substance.

Romance VI: Romance Publishing: Canadian Romance, ePublishing, and Erotica, Oh My!
Session Chair: Crystal Goldman, San Jose State University

“‘Can I set it in Canada?’: CanLit and Romance Publishing”‖ Jessica Taylor, University of Toronto

Taylor is an anthropologist, utilizes Bourdieu – field of forces , struggles

Thinks about how writers experience industry

Examines the plot in the field of literary production of romance in Canada

Is there romance in Canada and if so does anyone want to read about it

Notes her own gap: knowledge of French language publication especially coming out of Quebec

“Difficult to find romance in Canadian literature.” So said one academic when interviewed.

To be labeled “CanLit” one must fit certain criteria, for example, being Margaret Atwood. (LOLOL!!!)

Notes how hard it is to get any book into traditional media anywhere, but something specific going on in Canada.

With exception of HQN, large publishers in Canada don’t publish romance. Contrast with US.

Structure of govt funding also maintains divisions. Canada Council won’t fund romance.

The part of the literary field which is defined as Canadian is formed by all of these forces – media, industry, govt

Notes that HQN will change CDN cities to US cities. Asserts an ambivalence about whether rom novels can be set in CDN.  Agent she interviewed  said target audience for categories is US, so setting has to be accessible. If setting is CDN, must be purposefully so.

“Romance Rebound: Further Comparisons in e-Publishing and Print Publishers by Erotica and Erotic Romance Authors”‖ Crystal Goldman

Disagrees with Regis’s definition of romance novel. Now includes multiple heroes, sometimes no heroines at all, no longer a betrothal

Interviewed 10 romance authors published in both e and print erotic romance in 2007-8. Lauren Dane, Tawny Taylor, Sasha White, Kate Pierce, Kate Douglas, others.

At time of initial interview, huge erotica boom.

Popularity of erotic romance has waned a bit (Aphrodisia Kensington editor in PW, others cited as saying erotic romance is “overpublished”).

Saturation.

Market not as large as previously thought.

Many other genres heated up i nterms of editorial, which also explains contraction of erotic romance market.

She went back to the 10 interview  subjects recently, hypothesizing the ways the changes in the erotic market has impacted them.

Notes a few of the authors have since sold non-erotic works. They say they wanted to reach a larger audience.

Some wrote for Black Lace, and had to find other houses for work they would have submitted there.

Some signing contacts for 1 book instead of 2.

Softening in epub market maybe due to trad print publishing’s encroachment on market. Ex. Amazon.

Changes in publishing market especially key for romance.

Noting that ebooks selling very well compared to same book in print.

How does the raising of prices and embargo on ebooks affect sales? Not good.

Her new interviews found all of the authors had made or were planning to make some changes, whether in pen names, subgenre, moving bulk of work to e, etc.

Some of the changes in the authors’ careers is due to natural career progression and the recession, but some is due to changes in ebook market.

“Author Discussion: Print and Digital Publishing”‖ Amanda Berry, Harlequin; Jeannie Lin, Harlequin Historical; Sela Carsen, Samhain Publishing

Amanda Berry – publishes SSE.

Has been writing full time for 4 years.

Talking about how one aproaches HQN.  Two ways:

  1. Submit query letter
  2. Contest

She entered contest. Silhouette Desire. She won, they asked her to do it as SSE. She was puzzled, because she associated SSE with nannies and babies and doctors. Her book was about Hollywood, big shot producer and his assistant.

Jeannie Lin

Writes for Harlequin Historical Mills and Boon, in UK

Harlequin knows exactly how to market their lines and what they are looking for. Down to a science, although there is some leeway.

Decided to write the stories she loved. She loved Tolkein, Lindsay, and martial arts fiction (she is Vietnamese American). Louis Cha, which her grandparents and parents enjoyed.  Wanted to mix this part of her  into her writing.

Notes that selling romance is hard for anyone.

She write a book set in 8th century Tang dynasty China.

Lots of interest from other publishers but ultimately deemed too risky.

M&B saw international potential. You see more variation in M&B historical.

Her book is Butterfly Swords and is out later this year.

HQN gives authors a sheet to fill out for covers (check off what h/h look like, what landmarks, such as Space Needle, can be used), but none of her book’s characteristics were even on the sheet, so the editors asked her to come up with pictures to give them ideas.

Sela Carson

– paranormal romantic comedy novellas for Samhain publishing

Notes that she married the Air Force, was in London with small kids, in 2002, had always read romance.

She Googled “how to write a romance novel” and came up with eHarlequin which in 2002 was the place to be for a romance writer even if you didn’t want to write for Harlequin

Was having a hard time working and reworking a Regency.

Suddenly had a vision of a chase scene in a crypt in Louisiana that was funny

Wrote a 23000 word novella.

Not hot enough for EC or Loose-I.D.. Sat on it for a year.

Samhain popped up – suddenly novella had a home.

Print anthologies don’t sell all that well, but e anthologies do.

“If you’re writing short, you’re writing for an e-publisher.”

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