The funding source.
The older I get the more I think Karl Marx may have had it right when he wrote, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” and so on. A jaw-dropper of an article by Mary Carole McCauley in the Baltimore Sun last Sunday about a new program in genre fiction at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland, got me to thinking these thoughts. According to the article, a foundation set up by romance novelist Nora Roberts has provided the college with $200,000 to start up a new minor in the genres of pop culture – horror, mystery, fantasy, crime, Westerns, science fiction, romance. And, oh yes, graphic novels.
Best-selling romance novelist Nora Roberts.
Here’s an explanatory quote from Pamela Regis, described as “the McDaniel English professor in charge of administering the grants, and a nationally recognized expert on romance literature”:
Popular fiction addresses an enormous amount of issues that are relevant to modern culture. High canonical fiction is a far more acquired taste. None of my students will ever pick up Vanity Fair on their own again. But they’ll read every book by Nora Roberts.
(Note: I’m pretty sure Ms. Regis means William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair here, not the magazine once famous for putting a nude, pregnant Demi Moore on the cover. )
McDaniel's scholar of romance fiction, Pamela Regis.
Now I’m in favor anything that may possibly sell more copies of Kaze’s penny-stock Western novel Bowhunter, provide fruitful employment to English professors, and help small liberal-arts colleges survive. But still. Have we arrived at the point where popularity makes right? Like the good reporter she is, Ms. McCauley buttresses the rationale for the college’s move by pointing out that in 2010 “genre fiction…outsold classic literary fiction at a rate of more than 5 to 1.”
“Romance literature,” she adds, “is by far the most popular branch of fiction, with nearly $1.36 billion in sales or 13.4 percent of the total consumer market,… In comparison, classic literary fiction brought in $453 million.”
Hmmm. You have to remember that I went to grad school in English and American literature some years back. When my favorite professor, something of a youthful rebel role model, was asked in seminar why the university offered no graduate course in contemporary fiction, he said, “That’s the kind of stuff you can read at night before you go to sleep.”
Implicit in his point of view, a common one in those days, is that there is such a thing as literary quality and that it is determined by the test of time. It’s also a wise view of human nature: he knew we’d read Kurt Vonnegut on our own time but that it would take a class to get us to ingest “Paradise Lost.”
Matthew Arnold, advocate of the best that's been thought and said.
In the present-day Webverse, I’ve often felt that my professor was right and Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture – “a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world” – holds doubly true. Put another way – my time is too precious to waste on schlock.
McDaniel acolytes of the romance genre would no doubt point out that neither Matthew Arnold nor my grad school prof nor I is “disinterested” (objective) in the sense Arnold meant it and something that’s far worse: indisputably, all three of us are white males, reflecting a certain privileged hegemonic point of view that suppresses the valid emotions of women as embodied in the literature womyn create by and for themselves. In fact, we three blind swine are so unaware of our own biases that we universalize our own tastes as the canon.
You think I’m joshing. Here’s another McDaniel English prof, Mary Bendel-Simso, as quoted by the Sun:
I think our program will bring students to literature who might not otherwise be drawn to it.The minor is ideal for people who aren’t anywhere near being an English major, people with their academic sights elsewhere. Now, students in sociology or chemistry can enjoy the liberal arts. They can go beyond reading for pleasure, and learn how it makes life more meaningful.
And here’s one result of this kind of thinking:
“‘Formula’ has become such a bad word in literary circles,” says McDaniel senior D.L. Santos. “People really shy away from it. But, the formula is one of the things I like about romance fiction. It’s what a writer does with the formula that makes it interesting.”
Santos, 22, of Rockville, read her first romance novel when she was 12. Since 2008, she has been writing the blog, The Romance Girl’s Guide to Fiction.
“My view is that the world sort of sucks, and when I pick up a book, I don’t want to be reminded of it,” she says. “I want to be uplifted.”
Romance blogger D.L. Santos, right.
Finally, in the words of another student, a senior named Sara Krome who’d never read a romance novel before taking Regis’s course in romance fiction:
I liked that these books were by woman and for women, and that the characters were very outspoken and strong. They’re career-oriented and successful.
And why wouldn’t I want to read about a woman who gets to have good sex?
So there you have it. Point taken. Vanquished by the wisdom of coeds, I retreat from the field of combat. Tomorrow’s post will consider whether it’s possible to have what some would call romance within my beloved High Lit Tradition.
Ted the Cat (1994-present) is a domestic shorthair blogger and vers libre poet. He also enjoys sleeping, eating, and lurking. Ted the Cat co-habits with Kaze,
also a blogger at 317am.net.
RasoirJ and Lynne Cheney: separated at birth. Tweak, tweak.
Good point, WB. Bloviating makes for strange bedfellows, so to speak. Former National Endowment for the Humanities chief Lynne Cheney is famous for advocating a traditional approach to learning, but she’s also well known as the author of a notorious bodice-ripper of a Western novel called Sisters, now sadly out of print. But the book’s finest passages are available online at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_%28Lynne_Cheney_novel%29
If you’re interested in reading more of Professor Pamela Regis’s thoughts about the study of popular romance fiction, her keynote address to the second annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance can be found here.
“Tomorrow’s post will consider whether it’s possible to have what some would call romance within my beloved High Lit Tradition.”
Regis certainly thinks so. She includes chapters on Pamela, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Framley Parsonage and A Room with a View in her A Natural History of the Romance Novel.
Thanks, Laura. I will read Professor Regis’s address. I’ve read some of her other work, and she’s a serious scholar whose quotes in the newspaper piece don’t do justice to the sophistication of her approach. My follow-up post does consider the issue of romance in the High Lit Tradition, as Porfessor Regis does.
Without wishing to denigrate the importance of learning and propagating “the best”, I would suggest that the study of literature may also form part of an attempt to understand the societies in which texts are written and read. If that is at least one of the purposes of studying literature, it makes sense to look at popular fiction. This, I think, is what Regis was implying when she said that “Popular fiction addresses an enormous amount of issues that are relevant to modern culture.” It’s an approach to the study of literature which comes close to cultural history.
An additional way of thinking about English literature courses is in terms of the transferable skills they can teach students. I think that may be what Bendel-Simso is suggesting when she said that “Now, students in sociology or chemistry can enjoy the liberal arts. They can go beyond reading for pleasure, and learn how it makes life more meaningful.” Precisely because it focuses on popular culture rather than the “High Lit Tradition,” such a course may demonstrate to the students that close reading and literary analysis are useful skills which they can take out of the classroom and into their daily lives.
You make two excellent points, Laura. I’m going to have to attempt to read some contemporary romance fiction that’s written to the standard formula. My problem is that while intellectual speaking, I can buy into the study of pop culture, I’m afraid that ingesting a page or two of a romance novel will make me gag. Are there any first-rate romance novelists you’d recommend – any modern that you would set alongside Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters?
Without the benefit of hindsight, I’m loath to compare any current author to Austen or the Brontes. I also try to avoid making recommendations unless I know someone’s taste pretty well because even if I know that someone likes, say, Austen, it could be her sense of humour that they particularly like, or her way of constructing sentences, or the detailed social observations, or perhaps they really like Mr Darcy because they imagine him in a wet shirt, or perhaps they like escaping into a particular historical period. If it was the latter, for example, then a recommendation of a witty contemporary-set novel wouldn’t hit the mark. In addition, it’s always difficult to judge what will set off someone else’s literary gag reflex. Just where the Brontes are concerned, for example, someone who loves Wuthering Heights may find Agnes Grey gag-inducing because of Agnes’s piety, whereas a person who enjoys Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall might gag at the emotional intensity and paranormal elements in the Heights.
In An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction Thomas J. Roberts writes that
I wouldn’t want to recommend something which was not “a happy selection” and I do agree that to fully understand a type of popular fiction such as science fiction or romance, you need to read a lot of books. If most romances make you gag, though, I fear you’d be in for a rather unpleasant time before you reached the 100-novel target.
I’m really hesitant to mention my own work because I know some people consider it spamming, but it occurs to me that one way to speed up the process and avoid some of the gagging might be to read my book about Harlequin/Mills & Boon romances. Here’s the cover quote it received from Professor Eric Selinger, who teaches at DePaul University:
Thanks again, Laura, for substantially deepening the discussion of what I began blogging as an essentially frivolous subject. My curiosity has been aroused, and I will seek out your book on romance novels. As to why I like Jane Austen, you’ve hit it with “her sense of humour…her way of constructing sentences,…the detailed social observations.” Mr Darcy in a wet shirt is not for me, and though I thought Colin Firth was a brilliant Mr. Darcy, I felt the TV producers made a mistake by wet-shirting him. One of Austen’s virtues in my book is that she leaves this aspect of Mr. Darcy to her readers’ imagination. And oh yes, that reminds me of one contemporary romance novel that doesn’t make me gag – Helen Fielding’s Austen-influenced “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”
I don’t think anyone constructs sentences the way Austen did, but Bridget Jones has tended to be classified as “chick lit,” and in my book I suggest that chick lit tends towards what Northrop Frye labelled the “ironic mode.” So I’ll go for romances in the low mimetic to ironic modes, with contemporary US settings, and at least some humour, and very tentatively suggest that perhaps you’d like (or at least not be made to gag by):
* Kristan Higgins’ Catch of the Day. I think this has a chick-lit feel, and it’s in a small-town setting, so more like Austen’s (sort of).
* Karyn Langhorne’s A Personal Matter. There’s lots of social observation here. Perhaps, like Austen’s Emma, the heroine may not immediately seem the most sympathetic of characters, but she grows and learns a lot. This heroine, though, has had a much more difficult life than Emma’s.
* Jennifer Crusie’s Fast Women. The heroine is divorced, depressed, cynical, and over forty, which makes her a somewhat unusual heroine.
I’ve put in links to excerpts.
Thank you, Laura. Based on everything you’ve said so far, I judge you as a reliable narrator and will give one or two of these books a shot. I operate in the ironic mode approximately 93.7 percent of the time.
Another interesting post, Ras. But please forgive me if I don’t get to read the bodice rippers. Although I suspect that bodice ripping might be a fun activity with a willing rippee, I think I’m too set in my ways. If its not in a Classics Comic, then, by God, it’s not worth reading.
Thanks, ET. I think I’ve talked myself into the need to try a bodice-ripper or two myself – if only to blog a little more authoritatively.
Romance written BY women FOR women? Bull! Romance is for both men and women and it’s fun to read about a woman having good sex, but just as much fun to read about a bloke having same.
she gently touched his cheek … oy vey 
And, tell me, why must we always compare today’s romance writers with Austen or the Brontes?
Apart from ‘Bridget Jones’ (totally agree with the gagging there)I’m still trying to find out what books and which authors you are talking about and what you actually mean when you talk about romance?
Yippee, RasoirJ, for once we disagree. Isn’t that fun? I’ll remain faithful, though. For sure.
…and with the sun slowly sinking into the ocean
There’s a simple answer for me on why the comparison to Austen and the Brontes: these are probably the closest things to a romance novel that I can remember reading. My reading of current romances is minimal.
Good heavens, you didn’t even read ONE Nora Roberts? I haven’t either, mind you.
True, and until I read Bayard, I felt a little guilty about that. Then I did a10-minute sample of three randomly chosen Harlequin romances at the local library. Hate to say it, but my quick readings confirmed all my prejudices against the genre.
You did THREE samples? Bravo, RasoirJ. I ran away after just one wee sample. But then, what do you expect from a Harlequin romance?
Whatever the opposite of “deepening the discussion” is, I’m going there. Get with the times, Ras, and look into the current bodice-ripping taking the world by storm, 50 Shades of Gray. Nora Roberts is so 1985
Yes, I’ve heard of this nicely titled novel and may even have read a newspaper article or two (talk about 1985) about it. At some point I’m sure I’ll stumble across it and give it my one-page reading test.
Pick a page in the middle!