thebookishowl.com

“The Person Behind the Curtain”: Evolving Roles of Author and Audience in Paranormal Romance
Esther Guenat -  Temple College

When considering reader response criticism and its focus on examining literature and its readers in such a way that explores the diversity of readers’ responses to literary works, one might not immediately consider audiences of popular fiction, let alone audiences of romance novels. Readers of urban fantasy and paranormal romance are becoming much more diverse—both regarding who does the reading and those readers’ expectations—and the writing of each has evolved along with the audiences. While the use of supernatural aspects, sexual exploration, and urban locale were different standards of the two sub-genres, the conventional romance remained the same, as did reader expectation—heterosexual women sought out tales of supernaturally enhanced heterosexual relationships that ended in happily ever after. Recent reader-oriented critics have focused on how a given type of fiction audience’s expectations change over time; feminist and gender critics ask whether there is such a thing as “reading like a woman,” just as gay and lesbian critics ask whether there is a homosexual way of reading. Audience expectation of urban fantasy and paranormal romance has become much more diverse in its response—to gender roles, homosexual relationships, and even heterosexual relationships—and the formulas of these two sub-genres are no longer exact. Various authors have been able to somewhat adapt and evolve their writing so that it encompasses and allows for a more diverse following. Through this examination of works of various urban fantasy and paranormal romance authors, I explore the way the conventional romance novel formula is changing, how the readership of the genre is changing, and how authors of the genre are responding to and adapting to this change, thus creating a sub-genre of popular fiction that defies conventional ideas of romance and matches its audience in diversity.

“I am so over the whole vampires and werewolves and demons, oh my”: How a Series of Steampunk “Romances” Offered This Romance Reader an Alternative to Paranormals
Glinda Hall – Arkansas State University

It is not difficult to acknowledge the popularity and role that the paranormal plays and has played within our culture, and especially throughout our literature.  For romance fiction, it is easy to understand the appeal because the paranormal allows for sexual expression and experimentation that readers may not dare fantasize about within mainstream and/or contemporary romance.  However, when I began my journey as a romance reader and scholar some 8 years ago, I also found paranormals appealing for this very reason; but now I have become disillusioned with the illusion.  Not to overplay a feminist approach to romance fiction, but (thanks to the saturation of the Twilight series) it seems the paranormal has outlived its usefulness in terms of its once used format for sexual exploration.

In my paper presentation, I will show how Gail Carriger’s steampunk series – Soulless, Changeless, Blameless, and Heartless – gives us a heroine, Alexia Tarabotti, that represents a strong, intelligent female, but also one literally immune to the supernatural that is a very real part of her alternative Victorian reality.  Alexia is an anti-paranormal protagonist, and this anti-paranormal plot schematic and characterization exposes devises used by romance paranormals and counters them.

Re-imagining the Heroine as a ‘Slave to Desire’: Power Games and (Hetero) Sexual Rhetoric in Labyrinth and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Fanfiction
Danielle Lawson – Edinboro University

This paper explores the sexual rhetoric of power games, specifically representations of erotic power exchange in fanfiction written for the Labyrinth (Jim Henson) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon) fandoms. In particular, this research is concerned with the erotic power dynamic represented between the primary ‘romantic’ relationships in both original stories: Jareth/Sarah (Labyrinth) and Spike/Buffy (BtVS). Although the genres and intended audiences of the movie/tv show differ greatly, there are many similarities in the way the relationship dynamic between the characters is developed by authors of fanfiction. Using a combination of rhetorical analysis and critical discourse analysis, this study demonstrates how authors of hetero-oriented fanfiction re-claim the ‘dominant male/submissive female’ construct as an acceptable relationship dynamic. Moreover, the research presented shows that this re-claiming serves to build a subtext of feminine power, wherein the heroine is empowered (rather than oppressed) by accepting that they have the freedom to submit to their desires – even if that desire is to be dominated. In reaching this point, the male antagonists engage in a three phase power game: 1) Setting the Bait, 2) The Chase and 3) The Surrender. Other themes discussed include the disconnect between romance, power and ‘happily ever after’.

Teach Me Tonight

Over at Read React Review, Jessica has been posting about the concepts of autonomy and agency which she’s teaching in her course on feminist philosophy. She notes that one way of defining “autonomy” would be to think of it as being “realized by the right sort of reflective self-understanding or internal coherence along with an absence of undue coercion or manipulation by others.” Later, she adds that

it is conceptually impossible for there to be autonomy without agency. Agency is the bare capacity to act. It’s not a normative conception. A brainwashed person is still an agent, for example. I think in romanceland and everyday speech, “agency” means something more along the lines of autonomy, but that’s not how I use the terms [...]. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the conflation of agency and autonomy in romanceland is predictable given the general reluctance to look beyond individual psychology to structural, social conditions of choice and action.

Thinking about whether autonomy can only exist in the “absence of undue coercion or manipulation by others,” and whether this is an issue which is shied away from due to a “general reluctance to look beyond individual psychology to structural, social conditions of choice and action” reminded me of the following quote from Rose Lerner’s In for a Penny. Penelope, the heroine, is the daughter of a successful brewer who’s recently married an almost-bankrupt aristocrat. Her encounters with the impoverished workers on her husband’s estate make her “look beyond individual psychology to structural, social conditions of choice and action”:

Penelope had always believed that if you put your mind to it, worked hard, and didn’t whine, there was no reason you shouldn’t solve nearly any problem. She was beginning to realize that she had never had such huge, hopeless problems as this woman. (106)

—-
Lerner, Rose. In for a Penny (New York: Dorchester, 2010).

Teach Me Tonight

Norse Romanticism: Themes in British Literature, 1760–1830 is a collection of texts that illustrate how the ancient North was re-created for contemporary national, political and literary purposes. The anthology features canonical authors (such as Thomas Gray, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Walter Scott, and Ann Radcliffe). Standard editions of these authors’ works generally lack the contextual framework and necessary commentary that explain the way in which they repurpose Norse material. There are also more unusual selections of lesser known writers, whose texts have not previously been available to modern readers. The range of material presented in the edition has the scope and breadth to allow for new research into the Norse-inflected writing during the period.

The anthology shows how a number of writers utilized the Norse tradition to address issues of political and cultural concern, as well as find new aesthetic models for their poetry. Importantly, the interest in Norse literature and mythology came at a time when the need to recover ancient literary heritage came under tremendous pressure. Before the discovery of Beowulf (and the realization of its importance), the Norse past was taken up in an attempt to substitute for a missing Anglo-Saxon tradition. In England, the need for Anglo-Saxon heroic verse was given an increased sense of urgency as Celtic antiquaries began to publish heroic traditions associated with Wales, Ireland and not least Ossian’s Scotland. The Norse material also appealed to romantic-era writers for its ideals of Liberty, while the dark Norse imagination was exploited as a vehicle for the creation of Gothic terror. Therefore, the anthology contains texts that will be of relevance to researchers and students pursuing a number of different projects.

The introduction, headnotes and extensive annotations place the texts in relation to their original Norse sources. The extensive editorial matter also discusses the perception of the Norse Middle Ages, as these were shaped by sometimes fanciful antiquarian and romanticizing discourses in the period. The electronic edition is a unique resource that makes it easy to compare and search for the characters, themes and ideas that were central to the Norse revival in English letters.

Romantic Circles Blog

As seen at Frankensteinia and elsewhere, the New York Public Library is hosting what looks to be a fantastic exhibition of Shelley circle materials, many on loan from the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. The exhibit runs through Sunday, June 24, 2012.

According to the exhibition page, items on display include:

Selections from the manuscript of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.
Godwin’s Diary, digitally published with annotations in July 2010
Correspondence between William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft
The Esdaile Notebook containing P.B. Shelley’s youthful work (Pforzheimer)
Shelley’s gold and coral baby rattle
The only known letter from Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont’s daughter Allegra, who died at 5.
A necklace owned by the Shelley family with locks (lockets) of P.B. and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s hair
Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook’s engagement ring and her last letter before committing suicide
Percy Shelley’s copy of his first major poem “Queen Mab,” complete with his notes and annotations. The poem was politically-charged, discussing the evils of eating meat and religion, amongst other things. Shelley actually pulled the poem from distribution after it was published, and it was only widely disseminated after his death.

There’s more at the NYPL’s site for the exhibition.

Romantic Circles Blog

“Darkness Piles Up in the Trees”:  Love and Lyric in Eloisa James
Eric Selinger -  DePaul University

In 1993, Allan Bloom announced the “death of eros.”  It was not by natural causes.  Feminists, sexologists, and the ghost of Jean-Jaques Rousseau conspired in this “de-eroticization of the world” and consequent “disastrous decline in the rhetoric of love.” “There have been hardly any great novelists of love for almost a century,” Bloom sighed, although “cheap romantic novels, the kind that are sometimes stuck into boxes of household detergent, apparently flourish among housewives who haven’t heard that Eros is dead.”  Bloom’s fears about the “end of the novel of love” (as Vivian Gornick described it four years later) find a curious echo in period concerns about the “death of poetry,” which was announced and contested by Joseph Epstein (1988) Vernon Shetley (After the Death of Poetry, 1993), Donald Hall (Death to the Death of Poetry, 1994), among others.  What, one wonders, do these “deaths” have in common—and what are we to make of the evident survival, even flourishing, of both poetry and eros in “cheap romantic novels” from the 1990s and after?   The romance novels of Eloisa James provide an ideal oeuvre in which to explore these questions.  Professor of Renaissance drama, daughter of the poet Robert Bly and short-story author Carol Bly, James quotes and alludes to poetry throughout her work, not least in her latest novel, The Duke is Mine.  Renegotiating the cultural status of both poetry and romance fiction, she explores the afterlives of love and lyric in a (post-?) skeptical age.

Picturing the Self in Nora Robert’s Sanctuary
Zohar Korn – Independent Scholar

My paper explores Nora Roberts’ use of photography as the central metaphor for the self in her 1997 romantic suspense novel, Sanctuary. My claim is that through her treatment of photography, which she uses to develop characters as well as further the action, Roberts proposes two models of the self: the autonomous subject and the self-in-relation, advocating the latter. Both heroine and villain are photographers; the model of photography each chooses not only shows what each of them privileges as the principle around which to construct his or her sense of selfhood, but also implicitly provides Roberts’ commentary on those principles.

In the romantic plot, Roberts uses the heroine’s roles as practitioner, object and observer of photography to positively construct a selfhood that promotes affective wellbeing. The heroine’s gradual transition from taking pictures of unpopulated scenery to including portraiture shows a growing emphasis on care and relationship rather than self-sufficiency and independence, an emphasis that is portrayed as strength rather than sacrifice. Thus, framed within its narrative through the theme of photography, Sanctuary proposes a theory of selfhood that can, despite its different genre, be put in conversation with psychoanalytical theories.

Furthermore, the mystery plot juxtaposes the two photographers, determining that one is good and the other evil. By associating autonomy with the murderous villain who takes pictures as part of his killing ritual Roberts suggests that this notion of selfhood is morally problematic because it leads to objectification and violence. By showing that autonomy leads to objectification of others and violence while self-in-relation gives strength through care without negating selfhood, Roberts makes an ethical and affective claim in favor of the latter, which complicates criticism of the romance genre by showing that the self-in-relation is not a limiting construct used by heteronormative society to subject women but rather a positive way of life that might actually subvert some principles of heteronormativity.

Recovering the Hero: The Male Rape Victim in Romance Novels
Sarah Maitland – University of Rhode Island

Rape is a common trope in romance novels, typically perpetrated on the heroine. Often, although not always, the rape serves the purpose of positioning the heroine to be saved by the hero. We can identify the hero by the way he reflects multiple cultural norms of masculinity, including the ability and willingness to physically defend both himself and his woman from harm, or to seek revenge when harm is done. In this paper I will discuss a number of novels that deviate from these typical roles. The novels I examine also include rape, however instead of the heroine, these novels cast the hero as the victim. When the hero of a romance novel is raped the cultural norms of masculinity are violated. Typically the penetrating body, rape changes the landscape of the male body to be the penetrated. Romance novels that compromise the inviolability of the male body destabilize the gender roles that define the genre. In my paper I will examine the process the hero must undergo to reestablish his masculinity and reinstate the gender roles. In conversation with feminist theory, I will consider what the presence of the rape victim-hero and the process he must undergo means for the genre and what it may provide for readers.

Teach Me Tonight

Given that

The American Comparative Literature Association’s 2012 Annual Meeting will take place at Brown University, Providence, RI from March 29th to April 1st, 2012

and

The 42nd Annual PCA/ACA [Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association] National Conference will be held at the Copley Marriott Hotel in Boston from April 11 to 14, 2012.

and I’m not going to be at either of them, I thought I’d share details of some of the papers which will be given at these conferences. I’ll begin with the ACLA conference:

Jayashree Kamble, University of Minnesota

“Mermaid or Halibut? Crises of National Identity in Joanna Bourne’s Historical Romance Novels”

Jayashree also has a post up today at the Popular Romance Project, about myth in Harlequin/Mills & Boon romances.

Eric Murphy Selinger, DePaul University
“After the Deaths of Love and Poetry: Romance, Cultural Capital, and the Novels of Eloisa James”

Eloisa James mentioned cultural capital when she gave the keynote address at the McDaniel conference (Sarah Frantz’s tweets of the speech can be found here).

Martin Hipsky, Ohio Wesleyan University
“Eros and Danger in the Edwardian Romance Novel”

You may recall that Marty wrote a guest-blog-post for TMT about his new book, Modernism and theWomen’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925.

Angela Toscano, University of Utah
“Ravished, Raped, Rewarded: The Crisis and Catastrophe of Love in Popular Romance”

I very much enjoyed reading the paper Angela gave to the McDaniel conference, on “The Liturgy of Cliché: Ritual Speech and Genre Convention in Popular Romance.”

Finally, although they don’t specifically mention romance in their titles, I’m fairly sure these are about romance too:

Jonathan Andrew Allan, University of Toronto
“Loving, Talking, Curing”

Antonia Losano, Middlebury College
“Consummate Failure/Incomplete Bliss”

Teach Me Tonight

When writing her 2010 article for the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, Catherine Roach took as her

jumping off point [...] Robert Polhemus’s powerful study of nineteenth-century British novels of love and romance, Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D.H. Lawrence (1990). In his analysis of these novels that stand as high literary precursors to twentieth-century popular romance fiction, his key concept of “erotic faith” provides a reading of the emotional dynamic that the romance narrative then turns into story. Erotic faith, he writes, is “an emotional conviction, ultimately religious in nature, that meaning, value, hope, and even transcendence can be found through love—erotically focused love” (1). Erotic faith is the belief “that people complete themselves and fulfill their destinies only with another … that in the quest for lasting love and the experience of being in love men and women find their real worth and character” (27). John Keats, for example, in a recent movie dramatization, proclaims, “There is a holiness to the heart’s affection” (Bright Star 2009). Polhemus’s point is that we have faith in love, a reverence for it. Starting in the late eighteenth century with the growth of secularism springing from the Enlightenment, in the art and in the marriages of  western Europe and North America, people increasingly fell in love with the idea of being in love. This faith in love has become a new form of faith, to “augment or substitute for orthodox religious visions” (4), but with such close psychological functionality between the two forms of faith that “religious feeling and eroticism run close together” (10) and “love and theology may be surrogates for each other” (19).

I was reminded of this while reading Jo Beverley’s The Stanforth Secrets:

“Do you know how dreadful it is, my darling, to lie in my bed at night and know you are so close? A few steps to heaven. It is sacrilegious to ignore what we have here.”
[...] “That is a highly irreligious statement.”
He kissed the tip of her nose. “You are my religion, my goddess.”
Chloe used all her willpower. “Profanity too,” she said, moving out of his arms.
[...] “Not in my religion,” he said lightly [...]. “There, the only sin is denial of love.” (255-56)

——-

• Beverley, Jo. The Stanforth Secrets. Waterville, Maine: Thorndike, 2011.
• Roach, Catherine. “Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).

Teach Me Tonight

Eric Ambler once argued, ‘Thrillers really say more about the way people think and governments behave than many of the conventional novels … A hundred years from now, if they last, these books may offer some clues to what was going on in our world’. Theoricists and practitioners of other popular mediums would argue that this statement can easily be transferred to other areas. Gene Rodenberry has frequently argued that Star Trek offered him a platform upon which he was able to address burning social issues as he could do in no other medium. Will Wright suggests that Westerns offer a landscape through which to investigate the narrative dimension of myth; while Tania Modleski claims romance novels ‘speak to the very real problems and tensions in women’s lives’; and Kate MacDonald argues that early twentieth-century spy and adventure fiction reflected ‘broader social and cultural processes which shaped and reflected masculinity in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’. Such genres are rich in ‘cultural capital’, yet are routinely overlooked or considered mere diversionary, a distraction from the long list of what we should ‘really’ be studying.

The conference seeks to assert the academic importance of investigating the mainstream and wider cultural traditions, from cult followings (such as that of Rocky Horror and the works of Buster Keaton) to periodicalised ‘tales of terror’, from the regency romances of Georgette Heyer to the satirical wit of P.G. Wodehouse, from radio mystery theatre and musical revue to spy-fi and sci-fi, from food writing to fashion. We are not only seeking papers that offer a rigorous engagement with questions of marketplace, but that seek to explore the frequently overlooked.

We are especially interested in providing a space to discuss these under-valued and under-researched areas of the mainstream, in and of their own right. However, we do also encourage papers that investigate why and how culturally significant forms of popular fiction have been subject to critical marginalisation.

The deadline for submitting a proposal is 1 June 2012. More details can be found here.

This proposed edited collection addresses the persistent paradoxical repulsion and fascination with monsters and the monstrous, their genesis, and their reproductive potential across different time periods and cultural contexts. With the “birth” of the monster comes a particular anxiety about its self-replication, generally through perceived “unnatural” means. While the incarnation of the monster manifests through different vehicles across time periods, it is clear that, regardless of its form, anxiety is rooted in concerns over its fecundity—its ability to infect, to absorb, to replicate. This interdisciplinary book project aims to incorporate essays from various scholars across multiple disciplines. The “birth” of tomorrow’s monster reveals the inherent threat to temporality and progeny; reproduction of the “monstrous,” as well as monstrous reproductions, threaten to eclipse the future, cast uncertainty on the present, and re-imagine the past.

We encourage scholarly contributions from multidisciplinary perspectives. We will entertain submissions in literature, medical/political/social history, film, television, graphic novels and manga. Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Historical medical discourses about “monstrous” reproduction
• Medieval monsters and the monstrosity of birth
• Religious discourse of monstrous reproduction
• Eugenics, social biology and inter-racial generation
• Birth defects, deformity and “freaks”
• Monstrous mothers, monstrous children
• Monstrous regeneration
• Rebirth and metamorphosis: Vampires, zombies, werewolves and mutants
• Genetic engineering and “nightmare” reproductions
• Science fiction and inter-species reproduction and colonization
• Tabloid hoaxes and monster births
• Birth in the dystopic narrative
• Queering reproduction

Please send abstract proposals (350-500 word) with working title and brief biography listing any publications by email to Dr. Andrea Wood (awood@winona.edu) and Dr. Brandy Schillace (bschillace@winona.edu) by April 10th, 2012. Contributors will be asked to submit full papers for inclusion by July 16th, 2012.

Dr.Maria Ramos has sent out a call for papers for a special session, Female Identity and Sexuality in Recent Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy, at the 2013 Modern Languages Association Conference (to be held in Boston). According to Jayashree Kamble,

she is hoping to get several abstracts so she can put together a strong panel proposal. Dr. Ramos is the Head of the Department of Modern Languages at South Dakota State and has recently begun research on romance/urban fantasy/vampire fiction. 

Here’s the text of the CFP:

Fantasy female characters’ struggle with being a woman in the 21st Century attracts millions of readers. Why? Abstract 300-500 words by 15 March 2012; Maria Teresa Ramos-Garcia (maria.ramos@sdstate.edu). 

Teach Me Tonight

I think, therefore … I love?

In “Heidegger, the Erotics of Ontology, and the Mass-Market Romance” (2003), Deborah Lutz states that

This essay’s project is not to understand mass-market romance using ideas culled from philosophy, but rather to illuminate them with the same rarified light as philosophy. In fact, reading romance as we generally read philosophy not only sets romance up to speak about human experience in general, but it also serves to situate philosophy within a romantic paradigm. (2)

The essay is freely available online so you can read it in full. I’m merely going to cull a few quotes from it which possibly “illuminate” Jo Leigh’s Arm Candy. Lutz writes that:

The desire, love, of both philosophy and romance is to reveal the truth, to illuminate and bring it to a confession. The loved one envelops and imprisons unknown worlds, which must be deciphered. The erotically charged removal of the veil points to the spark from which this erotic originates — the veil itself. The hiding and the disclosing of the secret both create eroticism. Clearly, secretiveness is itself erotic. (5)

It seems to me that the desire for truth, and the eroticism of the “removal of the veil” are central to Jo Leigh’s Arm Candy. Dan agrees to pose as Jessica’s lover in return for getting to

“[...] ask you anything. No holding back. No thinking twice about propriety. I ask, you answer. Honestly. To the best of your ability. All the questions I’ve wanted to ask but haven’t dared.”
“You’ve never dated?”
“Oh, I’ve dated. Many times. I’ve had relationships. All of which have failed. Mostly, I fear, due to my fumbling. My lack of understanding. Seriously, I don’t get it. Screw physics and the Big Bang theory, the great imponderable isn’t God, it’s women. Who are you people? The books are useless. Believe me, I’ve read them. Everything from Men are from Mars to Dr. Phil. And I still don’t get you. [...]” (27)

As for Jessica, she’s extremely attracted to this

man who had it all: the looks, the brains, the wit, the strong hands, the taste in clothes. Her only hope was getting to know him. No way he was everything he purported to be. Impossible. (39)

Of course, she’s wrong, and the “removal of the veil” only makes him more attractive:

noticing a tiny twitch of his right eye, the way his nostrils flared, and his white teeth, not perfectly even, but made endearing by slight imperfections. It was as if her vision had gone far beyond the traditional twenty-twenty into a new kind of sight. Not just because they were so close to one another, but because a veil of ordinariness had been lifted. She could read him like a book, his need, his tension, his excitement and his pleasure. (137)

Jessica does not, however, immediately want to enter into a permanent, full-time commitment. Instead she wonders if she could prioritise her career, but still maintain her new relationship, by having an

intermittent affair [...] when they both deemed it time, they’d come together in what she fully expected to be a mind-blowing week of unadulterated bliss. Then they’d go to their separate corners until the next time.
Think of how much they would have to tell each other if they didn’t see each other day after dull day. It would be like Christmas four times a year. Everything would be new and fresh and thrilling. (213)

In effect, this plan would involve repeatedly hiding and disclosing their secrets, and in some ways it would appear to be a solution similar to that adopted by Heidegger, who

consciously created a relationship with his students that supported his character of an aloof and mysterious genius, often tortured by society and the technological world around him, finally wanting to live, reclusively, in his hut in the Black Forest, in the solitude he felt was necessary for his work. The biographer Elzbieta Ettinger writes, “Aware of his allure to both male and female students and of his power over their minds, Heidegger purposely kept his distance, intensifying the mystique, the awe, the reverence”. (3)

Dan isn’t keen on Jessica’s plan and his response to her proposal seems to be an attempt to address any concerns that the “secretiveness [which] is itself erotic” (Lutz 5) will be lost as a result of prolonged close contact:

The reason [...] that I haven’t asked you more questions, is that for the first time in my life, I prefer the mystery. I like not being able to second-guess you. It’s not frustrating at all, which I never would have believed. On the contrary, not knowing every little thing about you makes the days fascinating. I can’t think of a better tomorrow and tomorrow than to unravel the mystery of you. (229)

The novel concludes with Jessica agreeing to marry Dan and

safe in the cocoon of his arms. His breath caressed her cheek. As she closed her eyes, she felt something new, something foreign. A second later it came to her … She was home. (249)

Is this another indication that what is well known (“home”) can nevertheless be mysterious (“foreign”)? Lutz, writing about the German word “heim” (home), observes that an

etymological thread related to “heim” is “geheim,” which also has the “home” in it but it means “secret” or “concealed.” We already know of the “secret home” because of the Heideggerian idea that, in an everyday way, authentic homes are “secret.” [...] The romantic heroine’s potential, her “authentic,” lies in the presence of love. Her “ownmost” possibility is unconcealed, disclosed meaning. Her possibility as fully present to love is the secret behind all other secrets and this is her final “home” — destiny, fate. (Lutz

As a sort of post-script, I’d like to mention that I’d only got as far as Lutz’s initial comment that “The conjunction of these two registers — philosophy and the mass-market romance — seems one of the most unlikely and implausible” (2) when it occurred to me that this conjunction may perhaps seem rather less implausible in the wake of Professor Vincent Hendricks’s recent and very controversial inclusion of lad-mag-style photographs on a page advertising his undergraduate-level course on Argumentation, Logic and Philosophy of Language. And although Hendricks has now removed the photos and stated that “The intention was that the pictures, as a cover on a forthcoming magazine, might be used to view logic from a somewhat humorous and untraditional perspective appealing to larger audience which the magazine covers,” their underlying perspective is perhaps not so very untraditional after all: as Lutz notes regarding Heidegger, “In 1924, thirty-five years old, married and with two children, he seduced his eighteen-year-oldstudent Hannah Arendt” (3).
—-

Teach Me Tonight

The most prevalent narrative structure of popular romance is an integral element of any story, regardless of forum: film, television, fiction, manga, advertising. Not only is romance exceptionally popular, it is so pervasive as to become ordinary and overlooked. As the popularity of romance increases, so too does the need for serious scholarship of the genre in all its incarnations. We are interested in any and all topics about or related to popular romance and its representations in popular culture (fiction, stage, screen-large or small, commercial, advertising, music, song, dance, online, real life, etc.)

Proposals may be for individual papers or 3-person panels.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

*       critical approaches, such as readings informed by critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies, or empirical science
*       depictions in the media and popular culture (e.g., film, television, literature, comics)
*       literature and fiction (genre romance, poetry, animé)
*       types of relationships (marriage, gay and lesbian)
*       historical practices and traditions of and in romance
*       regional and geographic pressures and influences (southern, Caribbean)
*       material culture (valentines, foods, fashions)
*       folklore and mythologies
*       jokes and humor
*       romantic love in political discourse (capitalism)
*       psychological approaches toward romantic attraction
*       emotional and sexual desire
*       subcultures: age (seniors, adolescents), multi-ethnic, inter-racial
*       individual creative producers or texts of popular romance
*       gender-bending and gender-crossing

Submit a one-page (200-250 words) proposal or abstract by April 30, 2012, to Maryan Wherry, Popular Romance, http://submissions.mpcaaca.org . Please include name, affiliation, and e-mail address with your abstract. Also, please indicate in your submission whether your presentation will require a TV and DVD player. Note that LCD projectors will not be provided by MPCA/ACA.

More conference information can be found at http://www.mpcaaca.org/ .

For further inquiries or concerns, please contact Romance Area Chair, Maryan Wherry, Black Hawk College, wherrym@bhc.edu.

Teach Me Tonight