Thursday, February 09, 2012

Review of a Review of EIKAL

Back when I had time on my hands (ha!), I briefly flirted with starting a blog reviewing chick flicks and romcoms. I like my movies the way I like my books: smart, interesting, sexy, and with an HEA. I was tired of reading between the lines of professional reviews excoriating romcoms and chick flicks for not being Weighty and Meaningful, trying to figure out if I’d like the movie. I was sick to death of movie reviewers expecting these movies to be something they weren’t, something they had no intention of being, something that would defeat their very purpose and goals as chick flicks and romcoms. This kind of reviewing always seemed to be more about the reviewer and their insecurities about genre than the film itself. And that has always felt to me deeply unfair and frustratingly dismissive of a whole genre of creative expression that often does have weight and meaning to viewers who enjoy it.

And thus we come to Jessica Miller’s review of Sarah Wendell’s Everything I Know About Love, I Learned from Romance Novels (henceforth: EIKAL). EIKAL, according to Miller, is “boosterism” at its worst – incoherent, badly formatted, lacking distance from its subject, unhip, uncool, fawning even. What the romance genre needs, Miller argues, is sustained academic analysis about its literary merit, not heartwarming (even cloying) stories about what readers have learned from it.

I disagree and do so on a number of levels. Although I (obviously, I hope) believe that romance needs sustained academic exploration, I think that what EIKAL does is a necessary good. I also think Miller is expecting EIKAL to be what it never had any intention of being, what it doesn’t want to be, what – in fact – it has no business being (something, in my opinion, that Wendell understands, although that’s not really relevant to a review of the book itself). And in failing to meet and critique the book on its own terms, the review came across as ironically and unintentionally derisive toward the genre and its readers.

Four paragraphs in, Miller provides three paragraphs of background about SBTB and Wendell’s career as a romance-positive media pundit. Miller strongly implies that Wendell and Tan “scored” a book contract for their first book, Beyond Heaving Bosoms (henceforth BHB), because they destroyed the career of (plagiarizing) romance author Cassie Edwards. As I said in my comments at the review site, the facts are wrong: although BHB was published in April 2009, almost 18 months after the posts in January 2008 about Edwards’ plagiarism, the publishing world being as slow as it is, Wendell and Tan “scored” their book contract in 2007 and were deep in the process of writing BHB when they broke the Edwards story. And while Miller responded to me at the site that “Luckily, nothing hangs on the timeline, as far as I can see. I was trying to give the OLM reader a general sense of the Wendell’s history, not making a judgment in any way about that history,” I think, in fact, that the judgmental – even personally pointed – tone (Tan departs for “greener pastures,” implying, for instance, that Wendell’s career as a “man titty media pundit” is something she has to settle for, is the best she can get) colors the rest of the review. The tone of these paragraphs cradles and contextualizes the rest of the review, almost implying that the review hinges on an incorrect view about Wendell’s history and success more than it rests on the merits of the book itself.

However, Miller follows this highly questionable history with a fairly brilliant summary of the goals and aims of EIKAL:

The premise of Everything I Know is clear from its title: romance novels offer life lessons, especially about love and relationships. The critics who assume romance novels feature gorgeous, perfect people “meeting cute” and slipping effortlessly into a happily ever after are wrong: romance novels tell the stories of flawed people who struggle and face the same challenges as any average reader. Reading romance novels has a positive impact on readers’ lives, teaching them about everything from effective communication and mutual respect to being happy with themselves and enjoying sex. And to the extent that romance novels do contain fantasy sex, perfect love, and the kind of triumphant overcoming of impossible odds that makes for a compelling narrative, romance readers, aware that it’s fantasy, can still be inspired, comforted, or moved in ways that make them better, wiser people. Everything I Know takes the romance genre and its readers seriously, insisting that the genre’s central concerns—especially romantic love, sex, and relationships—are vital human interests that are often unfairly trivialized owing to their association with femininity. Wendell’s claims are substantiated by an abundance of reader testimony, author interviews, and some industry-sponsored research. While Wendell undoubtedly chose the responses that best supported her own hypothesis, Everything I Know offers romance readers a unique platform for sharing the impact these novels have had on their lives.

Yes, this is exactly what EIKAL is, which is why what comes before and after in Miller’s review is so problematic.

I will not comment here on Miller’s claims about EIKAL’s size, formatting, repetitiveness, or audience confusion. I don’t disagree with a lot of what Miller says in this section – EIKAL is not, in fact, even close to perfect – and I appreciate the frankness of her critique here.

I do, however, disagree with Miller’s turn to scrutinize Wendell’s “specific claims” about “reader engagement” and with her subsequent critiques of the book on those grounds.

First of all, Miller seems to imply that Wendell’s contributing readers/authors must be uncritical readers, because how they “manage to glean the good stuff from the bad” amounts to an utter mystery. But then, in the next paragraph, Miller claims that readers have a “diversity of . . . engagement with the genre” that Wendell ignores. It seems contradictory to claim, on the one hand, that readers are so uncritical and morally naive that they’ll be led astray by immoral representations in the novels they read, and then, on the other, condemn Wendell for not recognizing or for deliberately ignoring the nuances of her contributors’ experiences. And this contradiction goes to what I think is the fundamental problem in Miller’s review, which is that the book is being judged against Miller’s personal standards of feminism and literary value, rather than whatever standards the book establishes for itself (and if these are contradictory, then that is another, more pertinent, level of critique to be pursued).

In an apparent attempt to question Wendell’s over-generalizations and simplifications of her contributors’ experiences, Miller next turns to discuss her experience of reading Wendell’s book “as a feminist.” (My reference to Wendell and not EIKAL is intentional here, since Miller often refers to Wendell when critiquing the book, another aspect of the review I find troubling.) In the process, though, she (re)creates a fairly standard Second Wave feminist critique of the romance genre. More often than not, the review comes across to me as a debate between Miller’s feminism and what Miller (sometimes rather condescendingly) perceives Wendell’s feminism to be. This is particularly apparent, for example, at the point where Miller feels “dismay” at the anecdote by the reader who comes home from work and reads 30 minutes of Harlequin before preparing dinner. While Miller notes (echoing Radway almost perfectly) that such an anecdote begs the question of the second shift, she does not consider the possibility that the woman is a single mother, or that for any number of reasons there is no partner with whom the second shift labor can be shared. Moreover, the shifts in the review back and forth between a critique of the reader anecdotes and a critique of Wendell as author further confuse Miller’s analysis and forefront the judgments she is making as personal rather than critically embedded in the terms of the text itself.

Miller then calls for an entirely different evaluation of the romance genre: “It’s time to stop evaluating romance novels in terms of their putative effects on (women) readers, and to pay more attention to their literary merit and ability to provide pure pleasure.” I’m very unclear what Miller means by “pure pleasure.” Why is “pure pleasure” (whatever it is) better (as it obviously must be) than the pleasure that Wendell’s contributors say time and again that they received from romance novels?

More pertinent, however, to my own work and to most valid literary criticism of the romance genre is the combative dichotomy Miller constructs between reader response and literary merit as valid ways to examine the genre. Modern literary criticism is not, in fact, in the business of determining literary merit. Whether that’s a good thing or not is another question with much spilled ink to its name, but that’s just not what we as literary critics do anymore. I can say just as much about a novel that I think is truly bad from the standpoint of literary merit and “pure pleasure” as I can say about one that I think is brilliant (in fact, I spent a whole chapter of my dissertation doing precisely that). Literary criticism is not about picking the good novels from the bad. It’s about analyzing cultural phenomena. From that perspective, EIKAL is more valuable precisely as evidence of reader response to the genre than any list of the 100 Best Romances. Which is not necessarily to say that EIKAL is successful in what it sets out to do; the problem is discerning that initial aim (or aims) and evaluating the book on those terms, something that lies at the heart of both literary criticism and reviewing from an academic perspective.

Academically, for instance, I use BHB as evidence of the “received wisdom” of the deeply-knowledgeable romance reader, the “superfan,” if you will. Which is to say, when Wendell and Tan conflate Woodiwiss’ The Flame and the Flower and Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love as pretty much the same book, I use that as evidence in my own discussion of these blockbuster historical romances that this is how twenty-first century romance readers in general see these two books and the disparate genres they spawned, despite their significant differences from each other. I do not expect BHB or EIKAL to be anything other than what they claim to be, what they try to be, and what, I argue, they succeed in being. I do not expect BHB to be a vigorously researched academic critique of the romance genre. Nor do I expect EIKAL to be a rigorous scientific survey of a representative sample of readers. I expect them both to be what they claim they are: BHB is an exploration of the genre that defends the genre for what it does right and lovingly brings it to task for what it screws up, while EIKAL is a loving exploration of reader interaction with the genre that provides readers with both a voice and the arguments to defend their reading habits. Miller may disagree with my assessment of EIKAL’s success in achieving its aims, but I wish she had done it on the book’s own terms, so that any debate about the review could be based on the book itself and not an external standard of academic worthiness.

The difference between applying literary criticism to the genre or to EIKAL is important and generally ignored in Miller’s review. That Miller is writing the review from an academic perspective might account for some of this disconnect, although I don’t think it accounts for all of it. Some is, I think, a product of a conflation of literary critique of the genre from within the genre, and critique of a work that is more about readers than the genre itself.

I think, in fact, that there’s a disconnect between EIKAL’s aims as a proudly fond exploration of reader response, and Miller’s entirely laudable desire to have genuine deep critique of the genre. Wendell is not attempting in EIKAL to analyze the genre, nor does she have any pretentions to being able to perform literary criticism. Wendell is focused on demonstrating that her contributors (romance readers and authors) are intelligent, conscious consumers of the genre they (we) all love so much. She is also attempting to provide readers with a validation of their own reading choices and to provide non-readers with something to think about (hence, as Miller rightly points out, its confusing tone shifts at times). EIKAL might not, as Miller points out, change any minds, but it gives readers a voice to relate the (pure?) pleasure they find in the romance genre. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Miller’s review, on the contrary, suggests that there is, indeed, something wrong with that. This is not only a provocative implication, but also a different question from what the book is and whether or not it succeeds in being what it claims to be.

ETA Full Disclosure: I'm quoted two or three times in EIKAL. I responded to Wendell's SBTB posts asking for input and she quoted me from there, not from a personal interview. I am, however, also friendly with Wendell and occasionally share meals with her. But then I've also shared meals with Miller.

22 comments:

  1. There are two points I'd like to respond to, but I'm really rather under-qualified to to do since the first relates to reviewing (and I'm not a reviewer) and the second relates to logic/philosophy (and I'm not a philosopher). I'll give it a go anyway.

    Re failures to "meet and critique [a] book on its own terms," it seems to me that reviewers often come to books with certain expectations, and those shape their responses. I'm sure I've read quite a few reviews which say something along the lines of "I expected this to be a romance and it wasn't. Perhaps if I'd been expecting it to be woman's fiction/erotica/horror/fantasy this would have worked really well for me but...."

    First of all, Miller seems to imply that Wendell’s contributing readers/authors must be uncritical readers, because how they “manage to glean the good stuff from the bad” amounts to an utter mystery. But then, in the next paragraph, Miller claims that readers have a “diversity of . . . engagement with the genre” that Wendell ignores. It seems contradictory to claim, on the one hand, that readers are so uncritical and morally naive that they’ll be led astray by immoral representations in the novels they read, and then, on the other, condemn Wendell for not recognizing or for deliberately ignoring the nuances of her contributors’ experiences.

    That's not how I read that part of Miller's review. Miller's a philosopher and I felt what she was doing was responding as a philosopher to Wendell's argument. I thought Miller was trying to say the following:

    Wendell's title would suggest that

    (a) it's possible for romance readers to learn everything they need to know about love from reading romances

    but Wendell also writes

    (b) “part of the problem with romance novel sex is that it is so impossibly perfect, so incredibly over-the-top wonderful, that real sex can seem messy and awkward in comparison sometimes.”

    If (b) is true, and if readers know that (b) is true this must mean that (a) is untrue: readers don't learn everything about love and sex from romance novels since they must learn from other sources that some aspects of romance fiction are fantasy.

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    1. I just reviewed a story at Dear Author that, if I'd been reviewing it as erotica would have received a B+, but because I was reviewing it as romance, it got a C+. The difference is, I try to make my review perspective clear. DA is a *romance* review site, so we review books there *as* romance. That's given.

      Miller, however, was reviewing at a general review site. As such, she had to establish the background and history of SBTB and the purpose/goals/aims of EIKAL for an audience unfamiliar with both. It is my opinion that she misrepresented both, precisely because she reviewed EIKAL from the perspective of something it is not.

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    2. "she had to establish [...] the purpose/goals/aims of EIKAL for an audience unfamiliar with both"

      What were the purpose/goals/aims of EIKAL, in your opinion? As far as I can recall, they weren't stated anywhere in in EIKAL itself in an unambiguous manner.

      If the purpose/goals/aims of a work aren't entirely clear to a reviewer, it seems to me it's a lot more likely that reviewers/readers will differ in their assessment of whether the work achieved its purpose/goals/aims.

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    3. Laura: Like Sunita, it had never occurred to me to take the title at face value (there's a whole EIKA title franchise -- I remember 'everything I know about life I learned in kindergarten' vividly, but I don't know if it was the first), but now you've got me wondering. Do you think Miller took it seriously? Because that doesn't seem like a claim someone within the Rom reading community would really make earnestly. Or are you saying it was just a philosophical exercise for Miller, which makes me wonder what the point of it would be.

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    4. Given that inside the book Wendell writes that "Inside those stories is everything you need to have a happy, loving relationship" (4) I thought that the title was a (humorously worded) truthful claim.

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    5. Well, hell, if you take every single Romance book ever written and put them end to end, that might well be true, given the sheer number of words produced over however many decades, lol. Seriously, though, that straight-faced reading struck me as kind of insulting, and while I think the insult was directed at Wendell, it spilled over onto Romance readers, IMO (especially when combined with that argument about negative influences from the books). As if learning isn't also about making those value judgments about real life, informed by what one reads, but not merely telegraphed from a novel to RL. And I know that Miller makes a statement about not simplifying that kind of analysis, but in application, I think she does just that.

      Part of the issue for me is that the review was kind of all over the place and no place at once. Although one of the parts of the review I found most interesting and persuasive was the discussion of audience. That's a compelling insight and one that could be applied to SBTB and BHB to some degree, as well. And it's directly relevant to the gift book (and love letter to the genre and its readers) classification issue, as well. Plus, I think focusing on that more directly would have eliminated some of the more WTF moments in the review (like that second shift comment and that bizarre feminism v. conservatism dichotomy), and allowed Miller to really hone in on the gift book concept relative to her critiques of the book itself.

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    6. "Seriously, though, that straight-faced reading struck me as kind of insulting"

      Why? Sarah Wendell's written advice columns at her site in which she draws on romance novels, too. Yes, she's being humorous, but she does write in EIKAL, quite seriously, that "There are specific lessons to be learned from romance novels" (10). So I took her claims at face value because she seemed to me to be saying that romance novels can teach you everything you need to know about love.

      "it spilled over onto Romance readers, IMO (especially when combined with that argument about negative influences from the books). As if learning isn't also about making those value judgments about real life, informed by what one reads, but not merely telegraphed from a novel to RL."

      But Miller is herself a romance reader, so if she's insulting romance readers, she must also be insulting herself. I suspected she was writing from her own experience of the mixed effects of reading romance novels. I'm a romance reader too and I think they can have both positive and negative effects. They certainly have had both on me. For one thing, even though I'm entirely capable of spotting and analysing bits which, intellectually, I know should not be "telegraphed from a novel to RL," they can still have a negative emotional impact on my RL.

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    7. Laura: I'll respond in more detail (using both Miller's review and Wendell's book) later, when I have more time, but I just want to quickly point out that in addition to the portion you quoted from Wendell's book, she also points out very explicitly that there is are allegorical and fantastical elements to the genre that make the lessons learned extractive rather than literal. Moreover, she announces the intention of the book right up front: "In this handy little book, we can celebrate all the wonderful things we've learned about real-life love and romance that are hidden and not-so-hidden inside the average romance novel." So if the purpose is to "celebrate" the "wonderful," should we expect the book to address the "negative emotional impacts"? This is an open-ended question, but one that I think is extremely important both to the analysis Miller undertakes and the issue Sarah has with the book's purpose and its relationship to Miller's review.

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    8. Laura:

      Expanding a bit on what I said in my previous comment, I'll add that I think one of my central issues with the review is reflected in this sentence:

      "But her major strategy throughout the text is to concede that romance readers do learn from romance novels, while denying that what they learn is false or harmful."

      I think this statement is fundamentally incorrect and not representative of the stated purpose of EIKAL, which is to "celebrate all the wonderful things we've learned about real-life love and romance that are hidden and not-so hidden inside the average romance novel." I am not suggesting that EIKAL shouldn't be subject to a critical examination, only that I think such an examination should at the very least begin with what the book is and/or purports to be. Or if Miller wanted EIKAL to be a different book, then be up front about that. Because suggesting the book is other than it is sets up, as Ed Champion put it, a straw man. "Denying" something suggests that the author explicitly rejects the premise that Romance can model bad stuff or whatever. But Wendell doesn't do that, either. And I don't think anyone who reads SBTB regularly would view Wendell as someone who is in "denial" of some of the more problematic aspects in the genre.

      Now, SHOULD EIKAL have been written as a book that points out the good and the bad? I don't know, but I do know that would have been a very different book than the fan letter to the genre EIKAL is. And perhaps Miller could have made an argument for that other book. Does Wendell fail mission in her stateto "celebrate" the "wonderful" in the book? I think the mission is accomplished pretty consistently, but certainly someone might make an argument to the contrary. But again, that's a different argument than what Miller undertakes in her review.

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  2. I assumed the title was a play on the old book Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex*(*But Were Afraid To Ask). I thought it was kind of clever, since people assume that all readers learn from romance novels is sex. It didn't occur to me that to take it literally.

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  3. Literary criticism is not about picking the good novels from the bad. It’s about analyzing cultural phenomena.

    You would appear to be setting up some kind of opposition here, as though we can't analyse cultural phenomena and/or take an interest in what Pamela Regis referred to as "complexity":

    Wilder found that the special topos she calls “complexity” is an overarching value in all critical work from whatever era. Literary critics—we—all believe “that literature is complex and that to understand it requires patient unraveling, translating, decoding, interpretation, analyzing” (105). Indeed, for some of the critics she examined, simplicity, the opposite of complexity, was nothing less than a “much-maligned state” (110). So fundamental is the idea of complexity, that either by direct statement or by implication, each of us answers the question, “Are romance novels complex?” I think our answer to this question matters a great deal. […] Regis—I—claims complexity for the romance, saying, in as many words, that it is “complex, formally accomplished, vital, neither moribund nor corrupt” (45).

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    1. I am not entirely certain I understand the logic at play here. I don't see a contradiction between complexity and cultural phenomena. Or, is it because complexity makes romance good?

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    2. Since Regis mentions formal elements, I think her analysis of complexity is not solely centered around analysis of "cultural phenomena" as I'd understand the term "cultural phenomena."

      When Eric analyses Kinsale's Flowers from the Storm in the context of Milton's Paradise Lost, is that not something different from analysis of "cultural phenomena"?

      Or does all analysis of the formal structures of texts, their use of intertextuality and metaphor etc come under the heading of "cultural phenomena"?

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    3. Regis, in her Keynote speech, used rhetorical analyses of literary criticism that argue that one of the values we as literary critics look for in "good" literature is complexity. So, yes, Selinger's piece in New Approaches is all about exposing the complexity of Kinsale's Flowers from the Storm as a way to demonstrate that romance novels can have complexity.

      But then, I did the same for Coelebs in Search of a Wife by Hannah More in my dissertation, and I really REALLY don't think anyone would argue that that's a "good" book.

      There's a difference between demonstrating a novel's complexity and outright arguing for or against literary merit. One of the values that make up literary merit is complexity, as the rhetoricians that Regis used argue. But complexity does not necessarily equal merit. And demonstrating complexity is not necessarily making an argument specifically about merit, although it may be the underlying justification.

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    4. "demonstrating complexity is not necessarily making an argument specifically about merit, although it may be the underlying justification."

      And in your opinion can one demonstrate complexity without "analyzing cultural phenomena"?

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    5. Honestly, no. I think everything (our value of complexity, for example) is a type of cultural phenomenon. Can one demonstrate complexity without CONSCIOUSLY "analyzing cultural phenomena"? Sure. But if you want to get into the weeds of it, *I* would use Selinger's argument about FftS to demonstrate the cultural phenomenon *of* the literary complexity of romance in the early 1990s.

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    6. For me, the complexity thing is lit crit 101 -- something I tell my first year students by way of explaining that we've moved from a measure of "good or bad" to one of "how is this significant" and other questions related to how a text works and what it's drawing on, etc.

      It's like the 'take the text on its own terms' v imposing your own expectations on it distinction. Obviously there are going to be subjective differences of opinion on the former, but the articulation of those differences will be supported in the analysis by an explication of what the critic believes the text is, so that conclusions drawn from those suppositions can be evaluated within the context the critic establishes.

      In her review, Miller consistently uses the term "gift book" in quotes, which gave me the impression she really didn't believe that's what it was and/or that she was using the term sarcastically or ironically (although for what purpose I'm not sure). NOT that such a book shouldn't be subjected to critique and criticism -- just that it always seemed like there was a "yes, but" attached to that label in the review.

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    7. "In her review, Miller consistently uses the term "gift book" in quotes, which gave me the impression she really didn't believe that's what it was and/or that she was using the term sarcastically or ironically (although for what purpose I'm not sure)."

      I thought she was using this term because it was the one used on Wendell's website:

      Straight from the heart of influential romance blogger Sarah Wendell, this inventive gift book provides the best wisdom about love that the romance genre has to offer.

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    8. I got that part. It's the quotes that made it seem ironized. I mean, it's not like gift book is a trademarked phrase or anything.

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  4. "Or does all analysis of the formal structures of texts, their use of intertextuality and metaphor etc come under the heading of "cultural phenomena"?"

    The romance novel is both simple (structurally) and complex (formally). A novel may very well be formally quite complex, but if the novel lacks a point of ritual death, or the happily ever after (or any of Regis's eight requirements, or Radway's thirteen, or Frye's, etc.), then the novel, despite its formal complexity, is not a romance novel, that is, it didn't satisfy the simplicity of the structural requirements, the law of genre, etc. In this regard, the structure of romance will transcend the "cultural phenomena," but the formal complexity of the novel will be intrinsic to the "cultural phenomena."

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  5. In her article, "A Poethics of Love: Poststructuralist Feminist Ethics and Literary Creation," Margaret E. Toye provides an interesting discussion of intertextuality and love, which perhaps works well with the formalist discussion taking place here:

    Some postmodern writers have responded to the resistance that love has posed in terms of it being a matter of stigma and more in terms of it being a matter of crisis in representation around this particular signifier. A number of writers have called attention to the problem of love's deep intertextuality and the inability to talk about 'love' in a new way. Jeanette Winterson asks "Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation." Similarly, Umberto Eco indicates that one can no longer say "I love you madly," but must say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly." (42-43)

    This perhaps presents an interesting challenge about the relation between intertextuality and love, a challenge that Toye certainly considers, "the crisis in meaning is more complex than one of heavy intertextuality. As I will explore below, there is something about the phenomenon of love as experienced by embodies subjects that seems to bring language itself into crisis." (43)

    --

    Toye, Margaret E. "Towards a poethics of love: Poststructuralist feminist ethics and literary creation." _Feminist Theory_ 11.1 (2010): 39-55.

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  6. I'm confused by some of the points in both reviews, maybe because I don't know much about philosophy or feminist criticism. I'll agree that Wendell's book was meant to be positive/affirming, and that "Everything" shouldn't be taken literally. I'm a fan of the column and the premise, although I haven't read the actual book.

    It sounds like you're saying that Miller "read it wrong," or that feminist criticism can't be applied to this text. It also sounds like you're saying the entire review is biased because of an insignificant timeline issue. Who cares why or when the book deal (for a book that wasn't even being reviewed) happened? Even if there was a suggestion of judgment, which I didn't see, how would it color the review? I'm not sure what you're implying here. Miller never said that Tan and Wendell engaged in unethical behavior by calling out a plagiarist. There is no accusation of ulterior motives, such as...scoring book deals. If she did believe that (which I highly doubt) why would it impact her feminist reading?

    "Miller often refers to Wendell when critiquing the book, another aspect of the review I find troubling."

    You refer to Miller in this review. Is that troubling?

    "The tone of these paragraphs cradles and contextualizes the rest of the review, almost implying that the review hinges on an incorrect view about Wendell’s history and success more than it rests on the merits of the book itself."

    The tone implies that the review hinges on...you lost me. Again, I don't see how Wendell's history or success is an issue. Miller's opening paragraphs in regards to Wendell's background are given as context, and seem very complimentary.

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