One of my favorite songs from their latest album:

First of all, I was nowhere near campus earlier this week when the shooter opened fire — I was still in Oregon, on the last day of a nice long visit with my mother, who turned 60 this week. I was, however, emailing back and forth with my dissertation director, who was stuck in his office while the SWAT teams searched our building and who, earlier, saw the shooter fire into the pavement near the Dobie Mall building across the street. Another former colleague from the Ransom Center was also quoted in the local news because she was out in that courtyard when the gunshots started. It’s terrible that the shooter died and mystifying that he chose this way to die, but I’m so glad he didn’t actually shoot anyone else in the process.

Anyway: I’m still in catch-up mode right now — I did work a fair amount while I was in Oregon, but this semester continues to be more hectic than I expected. So here, have a big list of links:

• Ann Patchett on plot in the WSJ (outliners represent!).
• Laura Miller on Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx in Salon.
• Elizabeth Chadwick on writing historical fiction about real people.
• A recap of the Margaret Atwood/Ursula K. Le Guin conversation about SF recently held in Portland. I am so sad to have missed this! I was even in Oregon when it happened, but about six hours away and being stomped by a migraine, so.
• Sarah Prineas guest-blogging against authorial self-promotion online.
• An earth-like planet that may sustain life has been found, about 20 light-years away.

And finally, two links relevant to my plans for the evening:

• An interview with Paul Harding, the author of Tinkers.
• Cocorosieland. (They’re playing at Emo’s tonight! I’m so excited.)

Hipster Book Club has just posted a lovely thoughtful review of Alcestis and a long interview with me, both by Matthew Merendo.

Matthew originally posted a similar review of the book on Goodreads, and after I sent him a message to say thanks, he pitched the interview — and I’m so glad he did! We had a great back-and-forth via email, definitely one of the most in-depth conversations I’ve had about the book since it was published. As Matthew says in the interview’s introduction, we talk “about Alcestis, four Mean Girls from the eighteenth century, dead college students, and the status of gay lit.” We also discuss first novels, fantasy vs. mainstream literature, and my favorite retellings. Do check it out!

Okay, I’m going to have more to say about this once I read McGurl’s book. But for now, if you’re interested in

• MFA/MA creative writing programs
• Critical historiography
• The recent history of American literature/fiction
• It-narratives
• The history of free indirect discourse and other narrative styles
• “High cultural pluralism,” “lower middle-class modernism,” and the denial of historical consciousness in contemporary American fiction
• Jewish characters in the European novel
• Anxiety and shame and what they have to do with “creativity”

… please go read Elif Batuman’s essay in the London Review of Books on Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. It’s entitled “Get a Real Degree.” (I aspire someday to be as bold, abrasive, and witty as Batuman, but I don’t think I’m constitutionally cut out for it.)

I want to block-quote just about every other sentence in this essay, but I’ll limit myself to the last paragraph, which, while it hardly summarizes the points above, calls for improvement to creative writing programs in ways I sympathize with profoundly:

In the greater scheme, of course, the creative writing programme is not one of the evils of the world. It’s a successful, self-sufficient economy, making teachers, students and university administrators happy. As for literature, it will be neither made nor broken by the programme, which is doubtless as incapable of ruining a good writer as of transforming a bad one. That said, the fact that the programme isn’t a slaughterhouse doesn’t mean we should celebrate, or condone, its worst features. Why can’t the programme be better than it is? Why can’t it teach writers about history and the world, and not just about adverbs and themselves? Why can’t it at least try? The programme stands for everything that’s wonderful about America: the belief that every individual life can be independent from historical givens, that all the forms and conditions can be reinvented from scratch. Not knowing something is one way to be independent of it – but knowing lots of things is a better way and makes you more independent. It’s exciting and important to reject the great books, but it’s equally exciting and important to be in a conversation with them. One isn’t stating conclusively that Father Knows Best, but who knows whether Father might not have learned a few useful things on the road of life, if only by accident? When ‘great literature’ is replaced by ‘excellent fiction’, that’s the real betrayal of higher education.

I love and value creative writing programs; I want to teach creative writing. And I think Batuman’s essay is one of the best pieces of critical writing I’ve read in years.

*Heh. See Batuman’s article.

Links! Because my brain is turning into dissertation mush.

• A. L. Kennedy interviewed about her new short story collection. I laughed at the last question, as will you all.
• Dinosaur Comics on TERRIFYING ROMANCE STORIES. Whenever I want to post about romance in the future, I may do it with dinosaur clip-art. It just makes everything better.
• FDR’s Third Inaugural recorded. No sound, but it is in color.
• Matt Gross’s new travel column for the Times begins with an article about Tangier, a place I would really like to go, assuming I could find a way to feed myself there (couscous everywhere, I imagine).
• And on that note, today is Celiac Awareness Day. I don’t talk much here about having celiac disease, partly because all it really means for me is that I have to eat gluten-free forever and ever. But 97% of people who have it remain undiagnosed, and undiagnosed celiac means severely elevated cancer risks and more unpleasant stuff. (It was even the mystery illness on House once! I felt validated and also amused.) If you have ongoing health problems, do yourself a favor and get the blood antibody test, just in case.

Here’s what revising this dissertation chapter feels a little like, right now:

A quick Friday link: do go read Sarah Rees Brennan’s charming descriptions of mystery series, including an imagined dialogue between Dorothy Sayers and her publisher about Harriet Vane’s, uh, rather idealized nature. Great recommendations in the comments, too. I’d add Tana French‘s books — I didn’t love Faithful Place as well as the first two in the series, but The Likeness is just brilliant fun, especially if you love The Secret History.

And on that note, here’s a great NY Times profile of Colin Cotterill, a fellow Soho author who writes mysteries set in 1970s Laos (and a link to his newest book, just out from Soho).

Happy weekend, all!

I haven’t read William Gibson’s Spook Country yet, and my memory of Pattern Recognition is a bit fuzzy — I recall a lot of descriptions of the protagonist’s Pilates routines? — but this review of his new book Zero History, by Paul Di Filippo at the B&N Review, includes an interesting quotation from Gibson about the trilogy’s aims:

His latest book, Zero History, marks the culmination of a trilogy too new to have been named yet (although I will offer a suggestion at this review’s end), a cycle that started with Pattern Recognition and continued with Spook Country. All three books are set in a recognizable present, Gibson having foresworn traditional SF with the assertion that “fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day….” In an interview with the California Literary Review, he referred to this mode of storytelling as “speculative fiction of the very recent past.”

I’m skipping the rest of the review because I still do want to read Spook Country, but I wanted to post that phrase here because it’s a formulation I haven’t seen before. An intriguing historical fiction/sf mashup, and extra intriguing in the context of that statement about the luxury of imagining the future.

At Brooklyn Arden, Cheryl Klein is saying interesting things about narrative elements of the romance plot, YA, and Taylor Swift; Malinda Lo responds to a question in Klein’s comments about how those narrative elements may or may not change in queer romance plots.

Allow me to geek out for a moment. (I taught a class in fall 2009 on the development of the category romance, which means I have thought way too much about the building blocks of romance narratives.) What’s fascinating to me is how Klein’s list of narrative elements overlaps with but does not exactly match the set of narrative structural elements laid out by Janice Radway in Reading the Romance, a sociological study of romance readers published in 1984. (Pamela Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel proposes something similar, though Radway’s [EDIT: specifically structural narrative] analysis suits me better because it’s more Proppian.) If you study popular fiction as an academic, Reading the Romance is a core text. [EDIT: I don't mean that it's an uncritically celebrated text, just that people still consider it important, despite its flaws, as one of the early cultural-studies approaches to a particularly literary genre & its readers.] According to the blurb on the UNC website (linked above), RtR

… challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing’s most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. [KB: Interesting distancing there, considering that Radway is also a feminist, literary critic, and theorist of mass culture.] They claim that romances enforce the woman reader’s dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention “must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading.” She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader’s engagement with the text.

Radway’s provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers’ choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television.

“We read books so we won’t cry” is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect.

Radway may question the claims made by other critics, but as the end of that passage suggests, she also reinforces some of their findings. Specifically, she suggests that romance novels teach their readers to create fantasies that will render their unsatisfying marital relationships more satisfying by applying the rules of the hero’s “transformation” to their husbands: he rarely shows me tenderness, but because he does show it occasionally, he must secretly feel it all the time; those moments are the only moments when he allows himself to show it, but knowing that tenderness exists should be enough. This is, of course, a super depressing idea — the notion that escapist literature only serves to reify the status quo, in this case by preventing women from questioning their relationships/gender roles/the patriarchy/etc. — and one that I imagine pisses a lot of romance readers right off. I can’t say I completely disagree with the notion that the romance plot as it exists in most mainstream romance novels [EDIT: I should say "most mainstream novels in the era Radway was studying," which is what I meant] reinforces the status quo, but this particular formulation of that idea sure does assume a major lack of self-awareness on the part of the readers in question. (See this interesting blog post at Teach Me Tonight about Radway’s assessment of the Smithton readers.)

Radway is rightly criticized for the condescending tone she often adopts when writing about the women she studies — there’s sometimes a certain element of the pruriently ethnographic in the way she talks about what they really get out of reading romances (which is not always identical to what they say they get out of it). If I remember correctly, she addresses this in the preface she added to later editions of the book. Regardless: this book is still well worth reading, as is Radway’s A Feeling for Books (1999).

And now to the geekiest bit. My students read Radway’s chapter on the “Ideal Romance,” in which she uses the Smithton readers’ responses to a survey to build the narrative schema I mentioned before. This is how Radway describes the building blocks of their ideal romance:

1. The heroine’s social identity is destroyed.
2. The heroine reacts antagonistically to an aristocratic male.
3. The aristocratic male responds ambiguously to the heroine.
4. The heroine interprets the hero’s behavior as evidence of a purely sexual interest in her.
5. The heroine responds to the hero’s behavior with anger or coldness.
6. The hero retaliates by punishing the heroine.
7. The heroine and hero are physically and/or emotionally separated.
8. The hero treats the heroine tenderly.
9. The heroine responds warmly to the hero’s act of tenderness.
10. The heroine reinterprets the hero’s ambiguous behavior as the product of previous hurt.
11. The hero proposes/openly declares his love for/demonstrates his unwavering commitment to the heroine with a supreme act of tenderness.
12. The heroine responds sexually and emotionally.
13. The heroine’s identity is restored. (RtR 134)

Radway’s mapping out a particular plot, of course — the plot that her survey respondents said they liked best and felt was most successful — while Klein and Lo are both talking about narrative elements more individually. But there are still some direct overlaps: separation, sacrifice, “being known,” “moral education.” I would be really curious to know if many romance readers today would cite a similar plotline as their “ideal romance,” or if they’d be more likely to pick out individual narrative themes/building blocks and cite those. And I also wonder if the above narrative is often reproduced in gay romance, or not — since there are, as Lo points out, other narratives that often dominate gay romance, at least as it’s depicted in the mainstream (some negatively, some more positively). Thoughts? Observations from people who actually read romance regularly?

EDIT: Please see my comments below to Carolyn and Jessica about Radway’s book and my interest in it (which is about the structural geekiness described above, not about her theories regarding why women read romance novels). I didn’t clarify this well enough in my original post. Sorry!