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In the fall of 2005 I came back from a quarter’s research leave to teach my first DePaul University class on popular romance fiction.  Since then, I have taught nearly thirty of these ten-week courses on the genre, ranging from large undergraduate surveys to senior and graduate (MA) seminars.  I’m coming up on a break in that teaching:  I go on another research leave in the fall, and won’t teach another romance class until a year from now, at least.  So before what I’ve learned from all that teaching slips out of my mind, I’d like to post a series of pieces on it here at Teach Me Tonight.

The text of these posts will be derived, at least at first, from a couple of conference papers I’ve given on teaching popular romance, with some additional commentary, book lists, and so on, added to freshen them up.  I must admit, I’m at the point in the quarter right now when it seems–just like clockwork, year after year–that I know very little about either teaching or popular romance, but I’ll try to keep the self-doubt to a minimum!  (If you want to read about that, you can find more at my personal / poetry-teaching blog, Say Something Wonderful.)  My goal in breaking things up, rather than writing one long post, is to give myself room to meander and muse, and if you’d like to ask me questions about the courses, the books, the assignments, I’d be very glad to answer them.

By way of a prologue, let me just say that my courses here have been various sizes.  A 20-student “seminar” was the smallest, I think (not counting independent studies), and the largest ones are  are 35-40 student lecture / discussion classes.  At whatever size they’re offered, however, they fill up quickly:  mostly with women, as a rule, but I have had up to 20% of the class be male.

To teach such courses, I have learned, is something of a privilege.  Not many people get to teach popular romance fiction, and many who do, approach it in the context of broader courses on literary fiction, popular culture, or women’s studies. But there are distinctive challenges and rewards to teaching a course entirely on the genre, and I hope these posts will both inspire and equip some of you reading them to pitch such courses to your respective deans and department chairs.  If you do, and they bite, let me know.

(Image is my alter-ego, Prof. H. M. Wogglebug, T.E.)

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In “‘Traitorous Bodies’: Cartesian Dualism in Romance Novels by Susan Johnson and E. L. James,” Taylor D. Cortesi argues that

Applying René Descartes’s theory of mind/body dualism to the heroines in Susan Johnson’s Seized by Love and E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey reveals not only a separation between the heroines’ minds and bodies, but proves that both heroines are depicted as distinctly body. As such, serious complications arise for the female characters, including the acceptance of sexual violence and submission to the patriarchy. (viii)

Cortesi suggests that

while Fifty Shades of Grey is superficially about the Dominant/Submissive BDSM relationship that develops between protagonists Ana Steele and Christian Grey, it is also the story of a Dominant/Submissive relationship that forms within Ana herself. Because of the Cartesian mind/body dualism evident in Ana, the opposition within her echoes the oppositional relationship between the two main characters. Ana’s mind is at first independent and strong, just as Ana is when she first meets Christian; however, once her body is awakened, Ana’s mind is weakened and becomes submissive to the desires of her body, just as she is weakened and controlled by Christian. (68-69)

Melissa E Travis’s PhD thesis, “Assume the Position: Exploring Discipline Relationships” isn’t solely about romance novels but it does include a section on “discipline romance novels.”  As explained in the abstract,

Discipline relationships are consensual adult relationships between submissive and dominant partners who employ authority and corporal punishment. This population uses social media to discuss the private nature of their ritualized fantasies, desires, and practices. Participants of these relationships resist a sadomasochistic label of BDSM or domestic abuse.

Romance novels about such relationships are apparently growing in number:

Discipline romance novels, published through independent vanity presses or as serials through memberships, are a salient feature in discipline culture. Over the last ten years I have watched the publication and sales of discipline romance novels grow from a grass roots, blog-based movement to a more formal established network. (159)

Since these are romance novels, they share many features with other romance novels but whereas Susan Elizabeth Phillips argues in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance that

I can only shake my head in bewilderment when I hear the romance novel criticized for depicting women as being submissive to domineering men. Are the critics reading the same books I am? What is the ultimate fate of the most arrogant, domineering, ruthless macho hero any romance writer can create? He is tamed. (57-58)

in discipline romance novels the heroes are

often dominant men, or men who find their dominant selves because of a woman who needs to be tamed or brought to submission. In traditional romance novels, dangerous men are often tamed and healed by strong heroines (Regis 2003:171). In discipline romance novels, dominant men often take on headstrong or unruly women and tame them through the use of discipline. One element of discipline romance novels is that submissive women are dangerous to themselves, their relationships, or behave destructively and must be changed through discipline from a dominant partner. These dominant men are unafraid of emotionality, brave women, or taming a bratty woman. They sometimes include a dangerous man archetype, but also include taming the shrew, and rape fantasies. After she is tamed, both characters have a mutually satisfying dominant man/submissive woman traditional role depiction, which fulfills both partners. (160-61)

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Cortesi, Taylor D. “‘Traitorous Bodies’: Cartesian Dualism in Romance Novels by Susan Johnson and E. L. James.” M. Lit. thesis, Texas State University – San Marcos, 2013.

Phillips, Susan Elizabeth. “The Romance and the Empowerment of Women.” Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. 53-59.

Travis, Melissa E. “Assume the Position: Exploring Discipline Relationships.” Sociology Dissertations, Paper 71. Ph.D thesis. Georgia State University, 2013. [Section on "Discipline Romance Novels", pp. 159-66.]
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I’m not sure this counts as a “Musing on Romance Fiction from an Academic Perspective,” but I’m not at all sure that it doesn’t!  A little parody, this, of Paul Simon’s “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” performed by yours truly (Eric) earlier this year.

The lyrics are all in the “description” area, below the video.

Enjoy!

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Romantic Circles is delighted to announce the publication of Romantic Numbers, edited by Maureen N. McLane, a new volume in our Praxis series.

With essays by Matthew F. Wickman, Marjorie Levinson, James Brooke-Smith, John Savarese, Bo Earle, Ron Broglio, and two afterwords by Maureen N. McLane, this volume explores older and newer logics of “matching” and “counting” and “measuring” (whether statistical, geometric, or otherwise un/calculable), and it registers an upsurge of interest in formal-language, neurocognitive, and medial-historical approaches.

The six essays of Romantic Numbers invite us to think “bodies,” “multitudes,” and “subjectivity” along different axes. They ask us to think about the (romantic) one, the (romantic) proper name, quantity, and quality; they invite us to reflect on the status of poetry and measure, about the work of the novel as totalization, about models of mind, about calculuses of populations and food. Ranging through Wordsworth, Scott, Malthus, Babbage, and Galt (among others), this volume points to new directions in romanticist thinking while reconstructing the complexity of romantic-period thought.

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Pam Regis notified me of a new journal, Porn Studies, which is to be launched in 2014.  The New York Times reports that

The journal, edited by two British academics, Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith, has already inspired some hearty scholarly endorsements. “We have waited a long time for an academic journal that treats the subject of the representation of human sexuality with the seriousness it deserves,” Julie Peakman, a historian at the University of London and the author of “Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in 18th-Century England,” said in a statement. “I look forward to a lively and disciplined debate across different disciplines.”

I wonder if one of those disciplines might be popular romance studies given that romance, and particularly erotic romance,

often asserts itself as something other than pornography. It claims not to just be erotic, but romantic. The romance part ought to indicate that it is doing more with sex and sexuality than merely recounting various bits of fucking for the reader’s titillation. Otherwise, why call it romance? Why not just be pornography?  (Toscano)

The boundaries between romance, erotica and pornography may be of particular interest at the moment given the fame and popularity of the Fifty Shades trilogy: “More than just an instance of a particular genre of fiction, Fifty Shades has spawned considerable discussion of the significance of ‘women’s popular erotic fiction’ generally” (Phillips and Trevenen). As Jodi McAlister argues, Fifty Shades

occupies a strangely liminal position at the crossroads of several genres, adopting structural elements from both modern popular romance fiction and 19th-century pornography.

The call for papers for the Journal of Porn Studies can be found here.

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McAlister, Jodi. “Fifty Shades of Genre.” Popular Romance Project. 8 Nov. 2012.

Phillips, Kristen and Claire Trevenen. “CFP – Shattering Releases: The Pleasures and Politics of Popular Erotic Fiction (edited collection).” 2013.

Schuessler, Jennifer. “Routledge to Publish Porn Studies Journal.” The New York Times. 30 April 2013.

Toscano, Angela. “Why I Now Hate Erotic Romance.” Dear Author. 30 April 2013. Originally published at That Sly Wench, 9 January 2012.
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I’m teaching Eloisa James’s The Duke is Mine this afternoon, so I’ve spent much of this glorious May Day indoors, re-reading the book and taking notes.

One of them concerns a little phrase that the second male lead, Rupert, says early in the book, when he promises to marry our heroine after he’s returned from battle, “Trailing glory, you understand” (41).  Near the end of the book, the phrase returns with a slight variation:  ”Rupert was buried with honors:  not in the family tomb, but in Westminster Abbey, as befitted an English hero who trailed clouds of glory” (362).

The novel is set in 1812, and Rupert is a poet, so perhaps he knows the source of his own allusion, Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”  It was first printed, I gather, in 1807, but not published in its final form until 1815, and I’m not sure which version features the lines, but in any case, here’s the passage in question, with the key lines underlined.

Why this passage?  How does it connect to the novel?  Is this a “working allusion,” so to speak–one that has some actual bearing on the book–or just a tag that the author has in her head, and so put in the novel, as appropriate for a poet in 1812?

I’m teaching the book in conjunction with Laura’s chapter on Metafiction, so my thoughts tend that way, but we’ll see what my class decides, or I come up with, as the afternoon goes on!
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As mentioned in a recent tweet, from 1 May Sarah Frantz will be leaving academia to become a “full-time, salaried acquisition editor” at Riptide Publishing.

On the same day Hsu-Ming Teo’s Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels will be launched in Australia:

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Weaver-Zercher, Valerie. 2013. Thrill of the Chaste: the Allure of Amish Romance Novels. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

According to Johns Hopkins University Press

Valerie Weaver-Zercher combines research and interviews with devoted readers, publishers, and authors to produce a lively and provocative examination of the Amish romance novel. She discusses strategies that literary agents and booksellers use to drive the genre’s popularity. By asking questions about authenticity, cultural appropriation, and commodification, Thrill of the Chaste also considers Amish fiction’s effects on Amish and non-Amish audiences alike.

Weaver-Zercher is a Mennonite and as she writes in The Mennonite,

I wrote myself and my Mennonite identity into the book. I needed readers to know that I had some skin in the game, so to speak, and that I felt a strange blend of flattery and revulsion as I watched the burgeoning size and commercial strength of the genre.

I’d wager that many North American Menno­nites feel a flicker of pride in our theological and historical connection to the group that has become the buggy-driving superstars of popular culture. [....] Maybe all the Amish hoopla in popular Christian and secular cultures signals that there really is something excellent about this faith to which we belong. [...]

Yet as I read Amish novel after Amish novel, I felt a niggling sense of annoyance, too. It had something to do with the borrowing and benefiting at work in the fact that 60 non-Anabaptist novelists are advancing careers by locating their stories in Amish country. [...] I wondered whether readers were learning anything about Anabaptism’s communitarian ethics, nonresistant commitments and history of persecution. The near absence of references to nonresistance in the books made me suspicious. Although I hesitated to blame romance novels for offering a partial view of a complicated and centuries-old religious tradition, I [...] wondered whether these gentle narratives of marriage and family and neighbor and land did more to illuminate or obscure the identity of a complex culture. 

Those of you interested in virginity in romance may be intrigued by her suggestion that “the Amish are seen as premodern virgins”:

Chastity descends from the Latin term castus, meaning a state of being “morally pure” or “holy,” and this concept fuels the genre in several ways. The Amish, who reject public grid electricity, phones inside homes, and car ownership, are often viewed as chaste residents of an otherwise defiled larger culture. Like the mythic virgins of literature and lore, whose rejection of sex earned them respect and even beatification, the Amish are frequently imbued with power commensurate with their ability to abstain from what many view as essential intercourses of a technological age: driving cars, flipping light switches, using a laptop, owning a cell phone.  (Excerpt adapted for First Things)

You can read another excerpt here.
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