Hi, everyone! Two pieces of news: one small, one
big, and getting bigger!
First, the small stuff: like other conferences (ACLA,
for example), the PCA has been getting a slower and lower response rate than in
past years. As a result, they’ve extended the proposal deadline by one
week, to DECEMBER 7, 2012. If you’re interested, you still have time—and there’s
some funding to be applied for, in various categories, which you can learn
about here: http://pcaaca.org/grants.
The big news is, we’re going to have a special celebratory
focus at this year’s PCA—and not just there!
2013 marks the 10th anniversary of Pam Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel, a book that’s been tremendously
influential on the current wave of romance scholarship. In honor of that
anniversary, I’m issuing not one but TWO invitations to all of you, and I hope
you’ll pass them along.
First, if you’re stuck for a topic for this year’s PCA,
consider proposing something about A Natural History! You could
revisit the book on its own, or in its dialogue with other scholarship or
theory (Frye, for example), before or since. If you’ve taught a class or
unit using the book or ideas from it, what happened? How did it go?
Pedagogy always of interest at PCA.
Second, switching hats, I’m also the editor of the Popular
Romance Project’s “Talking About Romance” blog: a site that offers weekly
pieces, 500-750 words long, on love and romance in the popular media, now and
in the past, from all around the world. We have readers from well over 100 countries at the moment, and the numbers continue to grow.
In honor of the upcoming anniversary, I want to solicit
proposals for one or more blog posts on each of Pam’s “eight elements” that
define the romance novel: the definition of society (always corrupt), the
meeting, attraction, barrier, declaration, point of ritual death, etc.
The post should introduce the “element” in question and then talk about a
particularly memorable, innovative, subversive, or otherwise innovative use of
it in a romance novel or related text. (I.e., if you want to talk about a
romcom film, that’s fine with me, as long as you make the connection to Pam’s work.)
Again, pedagogical pieces are welcome; if you’ve used her discussion of these
elements to good effect in the classroom, here’s your chance to share the
wealth.
If you’d like to write one of these posts—and I’m open to
publishing more than one per element—please contact me at DePaul, via Gmail, or via the Popular Romance Project. Let me know
your interest, your idea (if you already have it in mind), and your sense of
when a draft post might be ready for me to look at.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
No comments:
Post a Comment