Reading and Writing in the Brave New e-World

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Someone on my Twitter list posted this article on changing reading habits, which I found very interesting and very personally pertinent.

In the last month, the only traditional paper book I've read all the way through is Suzanne Brockmann's Dark of Night, and that was an author's galley (8 1/2" by 11"; thank you, Suz!), not a "real" hardcover book like I'll be buying tomorrow when it's finally released. Everything else I've read has been on my computer (ebooks, articles from my Google Reader, Twitter list, LiveJournal friends list, email), or on my shiny new Sony Reader, or the newspaper.

When I first started writing a blog (LiveJournal and no, I'm not linking! :), I found myself narrativizing my life into LJ posts. How would I introduce my day? How would I make my post interesting/funny/poignant/readable? Is this happening worth posting about? How long will the post be--that is, is it too much trouble to write out? How much do I NEED to write this post, whether for myself or to solicit feedback?

Now I organize my day into Twitter posts. 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation, doesn't give you much room for anything. So I've noticed that I don't double space after terminal punctuation anymore (periods, exclamation marks, question marks, and the colon and its cousin, the semi-colon). I'm losing my articles (a, an, the) and many prepositions. I abbreviate more. I've lost the beauty of words and flowing phrases for the ability to convey my point in about 20-25 words.

When I read a book, I now wonder how I might review it, or what interesting thing I have to say about it in an academic article. I lost the ability just to read, to submerge myself in a book, many moons ago in graduate school. My inner literary critic won't go away. But now my inner reviewer adds herself to the chorus. Does the chorus of inner-mes contribute to my predilection for skimming, as the article above discusses? Does my inability to quiet the chorus explain why I find it so difficult to read a book without interrupting myself to check email or my Twitter friends list, or is that a function of the fact that so many of the books I now read are on my computer, and therefore clicking over to the next tab has just created a habit of mind that I can't break? Or is my compulsive belief that I just don't have any time to read mean that I can't sink into it?

Is this all a good thing? Bad? Or just a thing, just another consequence of advancing technology and no more good or bad than the introduction of all the other book technology that we take for granted nowadays that produced its own chorus of "OMG, the downfall of civilization as we know it!" when it was first introduced, before a generation or two of readers started to require them (like, you know, pages, and printing presses, and penny dreadfuls, and novels--I think you get the idea).

But how is this going to change The Book? I'd love to read a Twitter novel posted in 140 character increments that actually uses the form of Twitter to make literary points along the way. Silly me, that's already been done. But does the Twitter novel need to transform into "The Book" in order to be "successful." Well, certainly if "success"=money.

Plato can be found lamenting how the coming generation is rude and uneducated and doesn't respect its elders. I'm not trying to do that. I feel privileged to be part of the generation that is changing the world so stupendously. I'm just curious how it's going to affect my reading habits over the next fifty years. (And, to be honest, my job.)

Interesting CFP

The following CFP for an interdisciplinary graduate conference in Toronto might be interesting to some amongst us - it in particular reminded me of Eric's recent post at Romancing the Blog.


STRATEGIES OF CRITIQUE XXIII: LOVE
Graduate Programme in Social & Political Thought
York University, Toronto
May 8-9, 2009

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.-Ernesto "Che" Guevara

What do we talk about when we talk about love? With family and with friends, with lovers and with strangers, love is something we constantly pursue, practice, invoke and ignore. As elemental as oxygen, love animates our existence, but slips through our fingers the moment we try to pin it to the display-case of intellectual scrutiny. In the academy, we are quick to critique the dubious forms of love drummed up in the service of market and nation, but reluctant to reflect on the love that we live with every day. What could we mean by love? How to approach love's multiplicity, its objects, agents, bodies, acts, histories, dreams, philosophies, politics? Is it possible (or even desirable) to come to grips with love in the cold confines of an academic conference?

At the risk of seeming ridiculous - or schmaltzy, perhaps - Strategies of Critique XXIII hopes to trace love's matter and materials, its shapes and practices, its relations and revelations. Love is nothing if not ambiguous. Love moves us to action and to thought, but love also acts upon us in bewildering ways. Love binds and unbinds, hoards and gives, claims and renounces. Words and images of love surround us, seeping out of screens and headphones, but love itself can persistently be nowhere - or can unexpectedly return. Love intertwines and merges with desire, with sex, with longing, with need, with hate, with care, with loss, with domination and exploitation; it skirts along the ragged edges of gender, race, religion and class. Love is queer, excessive, uncanny, playful, fabulous, fecund, seriously fucked up. Faced with these ambiguities and antinomies, love nevertheless acts; we act against, through and with love; we make love, love makes us, shapes us, enacts us as we enact it. Love may elude our grasp, but still it holds us fast.

Strategies of Critique is an annual interdisciplinary graduate conference hosted by the Graduate Programme in Social & Political Thought at York University, Toronto, Canada.

We welcome a broad range of submissions including, but not limited to, the following themes:

The Power of Love and the Love of Power
More Than Skin Deep - love and race
The Bonds of Love - intimacy, jealousy, masters and slaves
Gendered Love, Queering Love and Simply Vanilla
Love Bites - bestiality and animality
Only Love Can Break Your HeartIn the Name of Love - war, nation, poetry
Forbidden Loves
The Things We Love - commodities, fetishes, passionate attachments
What's Love Got to Do With It? - desire, fantasy, jouissance
Divine Love
Love for Sale - sex work and the business of love
The Ability to Love and be Loved - bodies, limitations and desire
Philo-sophy - eros, agape, philia, caritas
Love Stories, Histories of Love
The Aesthetics and Ethics of Love - beautiful, ugly, invisible
Com-passion, Community, Autonomy, Solidarity
Tough Love - family and neoliberalism
Love and Death - necro-philia, mourning, thanatos
Labours of Love - class, transactions and exchange
Free Love
The Angel of History

Abstracts for papers (max 250 words) and all queries should be sent to spt_conf@yorku.ca. The deadline for submissions is February 20, 2009.

Strategies of Critique
Graduate Programme in Social & Political Thought
York University Toronto, ON
Email: spt_conf@yorku.ca

source: http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=166439

Fictions and Reality

Laura Vivanco

"Life, the aggregate of defined actions, events, or experiences, only becomes plot, story, theme, or motif once it has been refracted through the prism of the ideological environment, only once it has taken on concrete ideological flesh. Reality that is unrefracted and, as it were, raw is not able to enter into the content of literature." (Medvedev and Bakhtin [1928] 1978 qtd. Talbot 3)

"Fiction has to make sense; real life is often so perplexing as to defy explanation." (Miss Snark)

"Truth is stranger than fiction." (common phrase)

"As Luthi has pointed out, 'Fairy tales are unreal, but they are not untrue: they reflect the essential development and conditions of man's existence' (70).
But what can't be escaped can be revised." (Crusie 57)

"So what is fiction? Simply stories that do not pretend to be about real events. That's the easy answer, but of course there is more to it than that. The relation between fiction and reality is not a straight-forward one. The two have a peculiar way of getting mixed up together; distinguishing the two is not quite as easy as one might think, or hope." (Talbot 5)

Fiction, then, is selective. It can take elements of reality, but the particular elements which are chosen, and how they're placed together to form a whole, reflect choices made by the author, both consciously and subconsciously. What of reality? To a certain extent, all of us construct that too, as in the photo I've included above, of which the photographer commented that "This is a picture I took at the base of Niagara Falls, which itself is perhaps the world's most photographed subject. [...] I still use this picture to illustrate mediated reality, e.g. replacing reality with what's really there..." As individuals living our lives

When we chat to one another, we very often make stories about ourselves - about our excursions and exploits, about our thoughts and feelings. We create stories out of our memories - turning our lives into words and keeping the past alive. [...]
The news on television is full of stories. So are history books. We make narratives out of sequences of events all the time, even when involved in kinds of activity we would not associate with storytelling at all. (Talbot 3)

When we tell this kind of story about reality, we don't have as much creative freedom as an author writing fiction, but the similarities exist because this "storytelling" about reality is also "refracted through the prism of the ideological environment," and is also selective. Sometimes this selectivity is intentional, either because we deliberately want to mislead ourselves and/or others or because we think particular facts are not worth mentioning. At other times we may unintentionally forget or omit elements that seemed less important, or our narrative may take a particular shape because certain facts are not available to us. The Guardian advert, "Points of View," gives us an example of how this last possibility can affect the stories we tell about reality:

What we see in the advert is the same event, shot from various different points of view, and from each the "story" is different.¹ The final shot claims to present "the whole picture" but of course it doesn't, because the advert itself is a story (created by John Webster). There is still so much left unknown and unseen.

The advert also depends for its impact on the reader's knowledge. In other words, the story is "refracted through the prism of the ideological environment" not once, but twice. When we read or listen to a "story" (whether it's intended to be read/heard as fiction, or as a narrative about reality, such as a nation's history and identity) we interpret that story in ways which reflect own experiences and beliefs. Readers too are selective. We choose which elements of the story to prioritise, we do not tend to remember every word the author wrote, and we may have differing interpretations of identical or similar narratives depending on the context in which they appear and/or what we know about the narrator. Here's a very topical example:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Changefest '09 - Obama's Inaugural Speech

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

• Crusie, Jennifer. "This Is Not Your Mother's Cinderella: The Romance Novel as Feminist Fairy Tale." Romantic Conventions. Ed. Anne K. Kaler and Rosemary Johnson-Kurek. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U. Popular P., 1999. 51-61.
• Talbot, Mary M. Fictions at Work: Language and Social Practice in Fiction. New York: Longman, 1995.

1 I've tried to embed the video, from YouTube, in the post but if the link breaks or if it fails to work for some other reason, you might be able to watch the advert at this website. Some stills from the advert are shown and described here.

The photo is from Wikimedia Commons.

A Small Ethical Problem

Laura Vivanco

The problem of plagiarism's being discussed again in romance-land (because of something cross-posted at Dear Author and the Smart Bitches). I don't want to get into a discussion of the details of what constitutes plagiarism (anyone who's interested in our views on that can take a look at the posts Sarah and I wrote last year, and there's discussion of it on both the DA and SB threads). No, what I want is some help in deciding what to do when one discovers an instance of what one thinks might be plagiarism.

In a romance I was working on (written in 1979, not by any author with an online presence and no-one at all famous, just in case anyone is worried) I noticed a couple of sentences which contain significant fragments of text that are identical, or near identical, to parts of sentences in the current edition of the online Encyclopedia Britannica, at least the parts of it I could read. The trouble is that access to the content of the EB is restricted, which is why matching phrases come up via Google but I couldn't guarantee I'd be able to provide entirely accurate transcriptions of the relevant sections of the EB passages in question. I haven't had time yet to find an edition of the EB which would have been available in the 1970s, but I've no reason to suspect that the EB copied details from a romance novel, nor could the similarities be accidental, so I'm working on the assumption that that part of the EB hasn't changed much in later editions. I'll double check all that before I take any action, which is why I'm not including the name of the author here, or quoting the passages in question. I don't want to fall into the ethical problem of wrongly accusing someone of plagiarism, after all.

No, my ethical problem is about what I should do if, as I expect it will, the text in the older, paper copy of the EB matches that of the modern, online EB. I'll give a bit of an overview of the problem, to give a bit of context and describe the possible extent/severity of it.

Some sentence fragments in the novel which matched those in the EB were describing technical aspects of a building that the heroine is visiting (and is the building described in the EB), but other, non-technical parts could certainly have been changed and put into the author's own words and she didn't do that. I noticed the problem a while ago, and I was troubled by it, but as Nora Roberts wrote on the thread at Dear Author, "I’d need more than one sentence to get my dander up." Then the question of plagiarism was raised again at Dear Author and the Smart Bitches. As a result of the discussions there, I went back to the novel to take a closer look and last night I came across another couple of sentences with the same problem, just a few pages after the ones I'd already found. That's when I really felt I couldn't let it slide.

Enough little changes had been made to make me suspect that the author deliberately reworked the sentences in order to avoid full sentences of word-for-word copying. I suppose it's conceivable that she copied the sentences verbatim from the EB (though she'd have had to just copied out those specific sentences and none of the rest of the article for that to be credible), left them for a while in a pile of papers without annotating the source, then came across them and thought she'd already changed them enough to make them hers, and at that point reworked them slightly. Possible, but not very likely.

Maybe she thought she'd changed them enough for it not to be plagiarism. As we all know, though, using someone else's words while sticking in or taking out a few commas, changing the word order slightly and/or inserting a couple of your own words in between chunks of someone else's, is still plagiarism. I wonder if the whole thing might have been the result of the mistaken "it's OK if you copy from non-fiction in order to get the details accurate" mindset. Clearly, that's wrong. It's still plagiarism, and authors of non-fiction (as I know from personal experience, since that's what I write) can spend a lot of time trying to polish their prose.

I don't want to boycott the author completely because (a) the book has a very nice example of legitimate intertextuality (b) I'd spent a considerable amount of time working on that before I noticed the illegitimate kind (i.e. plagiarism) and I'd rather not have wasted all that time, (c) I haven't come across another example of the legitimate intertextuality quite like this one, so it wouldn't be easy to find another example and use that instead and (d) the sentences containing plagiarised fragments make up a very, very small proportion of the whole novel.

However, if the fragments of text match those in the EB, what the author did was wrong, and I don't want to let plagiarism pass uncriticised, so although I want to keep in what I've written about the interesting and good bit of the novel, I feel I should acknowledge the big problem in that other section, even though it's not directly relevant to the issue I wanted to write about. I'm currently favouring a compromise solution, which is to footnote the problem. Or would it just be sufficient for me to name and shame the author by posting the passages here, on the blog? Should I boycott her work completely? If I do, should I also boycott all romances which are problematic in other ways (e.g. racist novels or novels written by authors who've done something highly unethical)? Does exposing the problem in this way raise awareness of plagiarism, whereas boycotting an old text and refusing to write about it at all would be a meaningless gesture given that the book has pretty much already been forgotten by most people? Does raising the issue by giving specific instance of it in the romance genre make the genre as a whole look bad? I don't think so, since all kinds of genres, including literary fiction, have had plagiarism scandals.

What do you think?



The painting is of a fresco by Raphael in the Vatican, and is titled "The School of Athens." Many of the figures depict famous philosophers. I found the photo at Wikimedia Commons.

Eric on Love and Romance

Eric's at Romancing the Blog today. He's been in

conversation with a literary critic I’ve been trying to lure into studying popular romance. He’s a scholar of what he calls “literary erotic romance,” a genre that seems able to include poetry, fiction, and film [...] as long as it concerns what he calls “the impossibility of gratifying our desire.” We want too much, and are overwhelmed; we want the wrong things, and they destroy us; we want what we can’t have, and are left hungry; when we get what we want we don’t desire it anymore, or it leaves us behind. This, says he, is “the truth about love,” or at least the truth about eros.

Eric, however, sees things differently: "romance fiction also tells a 'truth about love': one that may not have the intellectual pedigree that his does, or the rhetorical grandeur, or the cachet, but that deserves a hearing nonetheless." And Eric's heartened by some recent scientific findings about love from Stony Brook University. Here's a description of them from one of the sources Eric read:

A team from Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new lovers. They found that about one in 10 of the mature couples exhibited the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as people commonly do in the early stages of a relationship.

Previous research suggested that the first stages of romantic love, a rollercoaster ride of mood swings and obsessions that psychologists call limerence, start to fade within 15 months. After 10 years the chemical tide has ebbed away.

The scans of some of the long-term couples, however, revealed that elements of limerence mature, enabling them to enjoy what a new report calls “intensive companionship and sexual liveliness”.

The researchers nicknamed the couples “swans” because they have similar mental “love maps” to animals that mate for life such as swans, voles and grey foxes. (from The Times)¹

1 I wrote a post last year in which I mentioned this line of research into the science of love and I've also got a bit more there about the love lives of voles.

The photo is of a "Pair of black swans with their cygnets on the lake of the University of York, England," it was taken by RobertG, and came from Wikimedia Commons. Eric prefers the foxes to the swans, but I couldn't find a photo of two foxes. However, I did find a nice photo of just one grey fox, which looks like it's tracking down something (albeit probably not the truth about love).

Branching Out?

Eric Selinger

Last Wednesday, Jessica wrote a fascinating post about the moral issues raised by a scene in the romantic comedy Love, Actually. To be honest, this movie made me deeply angry the first time I saw it. Several of its interwoven plots felt thin, manipulative, or simply cruel, and I've never given it another go. But two aspects of Jessica's piece have me thinking.

First off, there's the genre issue, or maybe we should call it the issue of medium. On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that Jessica should blog about a movie, since the readership of romance fiction and the viewership of romantic movies clearly overlaps. And, selfishly, the more romance scholars talk about movies the more good tips I'll find for padding my Netflix queue! (Cute Norwegian comedy last night: Buddy, with Nicolai Cleve Broch as a cute Norwegian.)

On the other hand, since getting involved with romance fiction, I've been focused on how much still needs to be done with these novels as novels: how much more attention they deserve as works of literature, rather than as sociological facts or psychological symptoms. (Not that they shouldn't be studied every way imaginable, six ways from Sunday--I'm just saying that the literary side has been particularly neglected.)

So what do y'all think? Do folks who study the Western switch hit from fiction to film? What about mystery, SF, and so on? Leaving aside blogging for a moment, should the calls for papers we write for academic conferences--Popular Culture Association, the Brisbane conference, etc.--be for papers on popular romance fiction, or on popular romance tout court? (Tish! You spoke French! Now that was a couple. "Everything I know About Romance, I Learned from the Addams Family," as a now-vanished on-line essay once put it. BUT they were a couple in a TV show, with no story arc to call their own. Do they belong in the discourse of romance scholarship--and if so, where?)

The second issue of interest in Jessica's post is the question of moral reasoning in romance. There is, of course, a long tradition of thinking about love as--at its most intense, anyway--somehow beyond good and evil. Sadly, I have to run and teach my Love Poetry class, so I'll come back to that topic on another day. Let me know what you think of the Question of Medium. Calls for papers--and my future courses--may depend upon it!

***

Morticia: So... you still desire me after all these years? The old ball and chain?
Gomez: Forever!
Morticia: I'll get them!

Morticia: Gomez.
Gomez: Querida?
Morticia: Last night you were unhinged. You were like some desperate, howling demon. You frightened me. Do it again!

On a Break due to Culture Shock

Laura Vivanco

• Oh come on, you know you’ve wondered about this too…you’re reading a really great romance, it’s the morning after the big love scene, the hero rolls over and tries to feel for the heroine’s tonsils with his tongue and all you can think is…ew, morning breath! (Angela James, at Romancing the Blog, 2008)


• "She was the most normal woman on the planet. Her idea of wild living was to pay for a pedicure instead of doing it herself" (heroine of Susan Mallery's The Sheik and The Virgin Secretary, quoted by me during a discussion at Dear Author)

• As you can readily tell from commercials, Americans have been taught that the natural smells of people's bodies and breath are unpleasant. Most Americans bathe or shower daily (or more often if they engage in vigorous exercise), use an underarm deodorant, and brush their teeth at least twice a day. In addition, they may rinse with a mouthwash or chew mints or gum in order to be sure their breath is free of food odors. They will not wear the same clothes more than once during a week, often discarding them to be washed after one use.
  
  It is common for women to shave their legs and underarms and to use a small quantity of perfume every day. (New York University's Office for International Students and Scholars, page on "The American body")
  

• I recently re-read Linda Howard's Midnight Rainbow. My first reading was when it came out in 1988. I could not remember any of it but found it just OK. The heroine and her rescuer are being chased, and nearly caught, in the jungles of central America and at one point spend the night in someone's home. The heroine has a bath and shaves her legs and underarms. Now I find this rather a rather silly thing to do when you are being chased for your life.
  
  I have noticed this 'shaving of legs' in odd circumstances happening in other books and it makes me think of the heroines as people with their priorities wrong. (Sally in Scotland, (from Scotland, UK) posting to AAR, in 2009)

• If I were in the jungle running for my life and then had a safe opportunity to bathe, I think shaving would definitely be on the agenda. I would want to do everything possible to relax, feel clean again, and return some normalcy to the situation (emphasis added, reply to Sally in Scotland by morninggirl5, (from Georgia, USA) at AAR)

• It's a book by an American author featuring presumably an American heroine. And in the US (going by your username, I assume you're not from the US), removing one's body hair is much more de rigeur than in Europe, as you can probably tell by some of the comments here. So to this American heroine, her priorities are not screwed up at all - body hair actually does make her feel dirty.
  
  Had I read the book and come across this scene, I would probably have rolled my eyes and thought, "Look. The American obsession with body hair strikes again."
  
  But then, Linda Howard does have a tendency to go a bit too much into details regarding body image issues that can be alienating to non-American readers. In the otherwise fine Cover of Night, for example, not only is there an anachronistic sex scene in a cave in the woods in the middle of a snowstorm, while the hero and heroine are running for their life (well, at least they did keep warm that way, though I still think they should have waited till they got to safety), there is also a detailed description of the hero's circumcised penis - an instant turnoff when you happen to come from a country where circumcisions are only performed for religious reasons and thus pretty rare. (reply to Sally in Scotland by Cora (from Germany), at AAR)

• Why is it the case (and I’m generalising here) that British women spend so little time and effort on looking after them-selves? Take, for example, Helena Bonham Carter, a spectacular example of the English rose. And yet she is regularly photographed looking like a bag of spanners. Can you imagine a similar photo of the American equivalent, say Michelle Pfeiffer? Absolutely not.
  
  As with many societal ills, I blame the parents. British mothers do not instruct their daughters the way American mothers do. In the US, beauty treatments appear to be a large part of their growing-up experience. A trip to the beauty salon is a group event for girls, an opportunity for a gossip and a catchup. (Ted Safran (an American), writing in The Times, in 2007)

• So if I were to go on a date with him I’d be supposed to be tweaked, groomed, waxed, tanned, yoga-ed, facial-ed etc at a cost of around £350 a month, and his equivalent would be a clean shirt, a shave and a tooth-brush?
  
  Yeah, *that’s* a guy I’d be interested in pursuing a relationship with. (response to Safran's article by Imogen Howsen (from the UK), at the Smart Bitches)

• Effie [the wife of John Ruskin] accepted her husband's explanations for the lack of physical love.
  
  She told her father in 1854 that she had "never been told the duties of married persons to each other and [knew] little or nothing about their relations in the closest union on earth".
  
  Eventually, her husband confessed. "He had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was ... he was disgusted by my person," she recalled.
  
  In other words, Ruskin, the high arbiter of mid-Victorian artistic taste, was consumed with the smooth-curved ideal of womanhood objectified in the classical statues of his beloved Italy and was revolted by Effie's pubic hair. (2007 article in The Independent)

The photo is from Wikimedia Commons and is of a "Statue of the type of the Capitoline Venus. Marble, Roman copy of ca. 100-150 CE after a Hellenistic variant of the Cnidian Venus. Excavated in 1794 by Robert Fagan at Campo Iemini, near Torvaianica, Lazio, Italy."

More on Politics and Romance

Laura Vivanco

I've written about politics and romance before, particularly here but also in two separate posts about individual romances. I'm returning to the topic because RfP asked me a question elsewhere which (a) would be difficult to respond to in a short space there and (b) which I thought perhaps some readers of TMT could help me answer.

I'll give a bit of background first. Jessica had been asking for recommendations and one commenter suggested she might like to read Loreth Anne White's Seducing the Mercenary. I responded by commenting that

Having read the reviews [...] I wonder if there’s any exploration in the novel of the underlying political situation and whether the US’s involvement constitutes neo-imperialism. The situation, as described in one review, is as follows: “It is up to Emily [the heroine] to determine whether Jean-Charles [Laroque, who's the hero], a former mercenary who arrived in Ubasi [a fictional African state] a year earlier and ousted the dictator, should be captured or assassinated” and Emily “is working with the United States to bring the former dictator back into power, and it will be Emily’s profile that decides what needs to be done with Laroque.”

RfP, who had read the novel, responded that

I’d venture to guess that the answer is overall no, or perhaps mixed. It’s a complicated setup for such a short book, so most of it doesn’t get explored. [...]

In terms of politics, I’m sorry to laugh, but I do a bit when I try to imagine a Silhouette exploring “the underlying political situation and whether the US’s involvement constitutes neo-imperialism” in much depth. Mind you, the heroine isn’t a conscienceless drone, and I appreciate seeing a romance heroine in such a significant position, but there’s not a lot of space for a twist that deeply questions the initial premise. [...]

Do you disagree with my skepticism on category romance tackling this scale of political theme? I tend to expect that in science fiction more than in romance; and within romance, I expect more in that regard (though I often don’t get it) when I read single-title (i.e. longer) romantic suspense and historicals. Have I missed out on an interesting trend since I don’t read much category romance these days?

First of all, the reference to science fiction reminded me of Lois McMaster Bujold's speech about science fiction romance (which I came across via a post at the Smart Bitches):

There are indeed problems for this Odd Couple partnership between SF and Romance, but subtly not, or not only, the ones I necessarily thought. I certainly learned some lessons about how genre boundaries are maintained not only by publishers but by their readerships. [...]

I was more surprised to learn something new to me about fantasy and science fiction -- which is how profoundly, intensely, relentlessly political most of the stories in these genres are. The politics may be archaic or modern, fringe or realistic, naive or subtle, optimistic or dire, but by gum the characters had better be centrally engaged with them, for some extremely varied values of "engaged". Even the world-building itself is often a political argument. [...]

Romance and SF seemed to occupy two different focal planes [...]. For any plot to stay central, nothing else in the book can be allowed to be more important. So romance books carefully control the scope of any attending plot, so as not to overshadow its central concern, that of building a relationship between the key couple, one that will stand the test of time and be, in whatever sense, fruitful. This also explains some SF's addiction to various end-of-the-world plots, for surely nothing could be more important than that, which conveniently allows the book to dismiss all other possible concerns, social, personal, or other. (Nice card trick, that, but now I've seen it slipped up the sleeve I don't think it'll work on me anymore.)

In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency. All three genres also may embody themes of personal psychological empowerment, of course, though often very different in the details, as contrasted by the way the heroines "win" in romances, the way detectives "win" in mysteries, and the way, say, young male characters "win" in adventure tales. [...]

So the two genres -- Romance and SF -- would seem to be arm-wrestling about the relative importance of the personal and the political. [...]

So: is the personal political? It does explain the edginess of the mutual rejection between the communities of taste of SF and Romance -- each is in effect rejecting the others' judgment of what is the most important aspect of the world, which naturally gets danders up. My own view is that the political sits atop the personal as upon a disregarded foundation; the concerns of higher status could not even begin to exist without a hell of a lot of unsung and often unpaid or underpaid work being done, and not just by women, to keep the real world running. To even acknowledge the debt would be to court bankruptcy, so it is carefully ignored.

I'd tend to agree with Bujold's view of the relationship between the personal and the political, because I see the personal (in romances this is primarily the romantic relationship) as taking place in a social, and therefore political (in the broadest sense, not party political) context.

Although RfP's probably right that political issues aren't generally tackled in any depth in romances, that doesn't stop me reading between the lines of the romance in order to catch glimpses of the political. And then there are the romances which, like White's novel, include situations or comments which are quite overtly political, even if the author doesn't explore the politics in much detail. I'm certainly not the only person to notice the politics in some romances. C. J. D. Duder notes that "The study of popular imperialism, how the British Empire was represented to the British people, is now popular among historians" (427). Duder's focus is on Kenya and "It was just as the political battles over white settlement in Kenya were heating up that a minor literary phenomenon, popularly known as the 'Kenya Novel,' began to appear in British bookstores. This was a variety of that much despised popular literary genre, Romantic Fiction" (428). Duder identifies these novels as having had an "immense, if indirect, propaganda value [...] to the position of white settlement in the Colony" (431) because

Riddell and Strange used their novels as a means of presenting the white settler view of Kenya to British readers. The settlers themselves, whatever their personal failings, are collectively responsible for the railways, roads, hospitals and schools, progress in other words, which the twentieth century has brought to Africa. They are the civilization in the Dark Continent. (432)

But what of more recent romances? To what extent can and do they include politics? Melissa James has written that the inspiration for one of her novels, Her Galahad (a Silhouette Intimate Moments, reviewed here), was

My university course in Aboriginal History in 1999. I read about the Stolen Generation, ‘half-caste’ children forcibly taken from their parents and either illegally adopted out or sent to orphanages to become Anglicized in culture. I was shocked at the extent to which the governments of the day were willing to go to do this. Such as giving the kids fake death certificates for their parents so they wouldn’t return to their homes. Such as imprisoning the parents on fake charges to get them out of the way. I had to write about it, using all those ideas plus other truths that my abuse counselor mother gave to me, to show just how life is for many who are perceived as “different” in society – and the last documented case of this kind was in 1987, so it wasn’t that long ago.

Another Silhouette Intimate Moments romance which devotes a sizeable (by romance standards) amount of attention to politics is Suzanne Brockmann's Get Lucky. Lucky, the hero, is asked by the heroine why he decided to join the SEALs (151) and he points to a photo and says "This [...] is Isidro Ramos. He's why I joined the SEALs" (152). He goes on to explain that his mother

started working full time for a refugee center. This was back when people were leaving Central America in droves. That's where she met Isidro - at the center. [...] Isidro later told me he'd been out trading for gasoline on the black market, and when he came home, his entire town had been burned and everyone - men, women and children, even infants - had been massacred. (154)

and

"[...] I used to go with him to meetings where he would tell about these horrible human rights violations he'd witnessed in his home country. The things he saw, [...] the things he could bear witness to ..." He shook his head. "He told me to value my freedom as an American above all else. Every day he reminded me that I lived in a land of freedom, every day we'd hang an American flag outside our house. He used to tell me that he could go to sleep at night and be certain that no one would break into our house and tear us from our beds. No one would drag us into the street and put bullets in our heads simply for something we believed in. Because of him, I learned to value the freedom that most Americans take for granted. [...] I joined the Navy - the SEAL teams in particular - because I wanted to give something back. I wanted to be part of making sure we remained the land of the free and the home of the brave. [...]"(157-58)

What I think is happening here (and was also happening in Betina Krahn's The Book of True Desires, which I looked at a while ago) is that the novel is contributing to the construction of, or reinforcing an existing model of, American identity. That's a deeply political project. In this particular case I found it impossible not to think about alternative views of American history in relation to Latin America which were left unspoken by the hero and unwritten about by the author. Greg Grandin has observed that

After World War II, in the name of containing Communism, the United States, mostly through the actions of local allies, executed or encouraged coups in, among other places, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina and patronized a brutal mercenary war in Nicaragua. Latin America became a laboratory for counterinsurgency, as military officials and covert operators applied insights learned in the region to Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. By the end of the Cold War, Latin American security forces trained, funded, equipped, and incited by Washington had executed a reign of bloody terror -- hundreds of thousands killed, an equal number tortured, millions driven into exile -- from which the region has yet to fully recover. (4)

As I suggested earlier, sometimes, at least for a reader like me, the politics seeps out from between the lines of a romance, and at others it moves quite directly into view, making its presence felt much more acutely.

Have any of you come across examples of romances, particularly category romances, where politics stepped out from behind the central relationship and captured your attention?

• Brockmann, Suzanne. Get Lucky. Richmond, Surrey: Silhouette, 2000.
• Duder, C. J. D. “Love and the Lions: The Image of White Settlement in Kenya in Popular Fiction, 1919-1939.” African Affairs 90.360 (1991): 427-38.
• Grandin, Greg. Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. Macmillan, 2007.
  

The pictures are of "The 'Glasses Apostle' in the altarpiece of the church of Bad Wildungen (Germany). Painted by Conrad von Soest in 1403, the 'Glasses Apostle' is considered the oldest depiction of eyeglasses north of the Alps" (from Wikimedia Commons) and Franz Eybl's "Lesendes Mädchen," (also from Wikimedia Commons). In my journey around Wikimedia Commons I also came across the cover of this comic book, and as it probably embodies many readers' ideas about the worst possible fusion of science fiction and romance, I couldn't resist including it too. Its title is Rocket to the Moon and the description reads "Could Ted Dustin, rocket explorer, and Maza, beautiful princess of Lunar, stem the powerful hordes of Green Monsters who sought to conquer the world?"

A Series of Links

Sarah's post about romances in series is up at Romancing the Blog:

To me, “series” romance means “category” romance (Harlequin, Mills & Boon, Loveswept, Silhouette, etc.). There are other series, of course, because the term is very loose, and this “looseness” is precisely what I’m interested in. Because “series” can also mean mainstream novels that are connected in some way. [...]

Then, uniquely, perhaps, there’s J.D. Robb’s Eve and Roarke series, where the narrative focus of the book is the mystery, but the heart of the series is the continuing relationship between the two main characters.

And it is this last one that I’m seeing more of, specifically in gay male romance, but with a twist. While we follow the characters in these stories from their Happy For Now in their first story, through relationship maturation in further stories, both the narrative and emotional focus of the books is the relationship. Unlike mystery series, which we follow for both the continuation of the relationship AND the new mystery in every book, these series focus just on the same relationship, book after book. [...] And does anyone else reading these series find the HFNs slightly unsatisfying and find the trend that a book labeled a romance might not have a strong HEA rather troubling?

Yesterday at Dear Author Jessica took a look at the progression of relationships and how that relates to selfhood:

In some ways, every single romance is about selfhood, since the romantic ideal says that until we meet our counterpart, we cannot truly be our best selves, our complete selves. What’s unique about this, is that the self is defined as fundamentally relational: people are not silos, who choose to enter relationships as they might choose to engage, or not, in hobbies, but rather, people can only be who they are with relations of the right sort with other people. I personally believe that the valorization of this relational way of viewing the self is a key source of the feminist potential of romance, but I also think it gives romance, as a genre, some unique and important things to say about questions of selfhood and personal identity per se. I have been amazed at the number of romances I have read, across all the subgenres, that deal centrally and directly with the metaphysical question of what is self and what is nonself.

What would it take for you to become another, different person? First, consider loss: is there one essential thing, say, your memories, or your physical body, or your career, that defines you? What could you lose and still be you?

That's more than enough to ponder, I think, as 2008 draws to a close, so I'll make this a very short set of links.

The photo is from Wikimedia Commons.

Assorted Links

Laura Vivanco

Since the start of the holiday season we've written a lot of to-do lists at my house so I thought it would be appropriate to write another list, this time for the blog. It's a list of links to thought-provoking, controversial, or perhaps simply irritating, items:

• In the Women's Studies Encyclopedia, in the entry on "Supermarket Romances," written by Karen S. Mitchell, Mitchell states that "The juxtaposition of a multidimensional heroine with a somewhat one-dimensional hero is a characteristic of the romantic historical novels written today." She also writes that,

  While the heroines of historical novels have become increasingly competent in their domains, they are limited by the social constructs of the historical time. In this way they are forced to be subservient and are often subjected to rape, dominance, and violent abuse. Helen Hazen argues that romances include rape fantasies because "rape fantasy is quite healthy" (17).

  It's probably worth noting that Hazen's book was published in 1983. Although Mitchell is clearly aware that the genre has changed since then, her description of historical romances doesn't match the contents of the historical romances I've been reading recently. Does it describe recent historical romances you've read?

• The next item on my list has been discussed in some detail by Jessica. It's Critelli, Joseph W. and Jenny M. Bivona. "Women's erotic rape fantasies: an evaluation of theory and research." Journal of Sex Research (2008). Hazen is again used as an important source:

  One review of historical romance novels found that 54% included the rape of the lead female character (Thurston, 1987). In particular, Hazen's (1983) analysis of rape in romance novels also functions as a theory of women's erotic rape fantasies.
  
  In essence, both romance novels and rape fantasies are created works of fiction. Sexual fantasies are self-generated erotic stories often intentionally initiated to provide enjoyment and sexual arousal. Romance novels are structured erotic fantasies that individuals intentionally expose themselves to, typically for emotional satisfaction and sexual arousal. In a rape fantasy women create an imaginary scenario and they participate in the fantasy through the rape experience of their self character. In a romance novel that includes rape, women identify with the lead female character and vicariously experience her rape.
  
  Hazen (1983) notes that, although the hero in romance novels must be handsome, he may also be cruel. Gorry (1999), in a content analysis of male romance heroes, found that these men are strong, masculine, muscular, sexually bold, and dangerous.¹ According to Salmon and Symons (2003), romance heroes are not gentle and sensitive; they are men with the physical and temperamental qualities of warriors.²

  And

  Hazen argues that the romance novel presents the heroine with an exciting challenge. [...] In romance novels, there is often a violent confrontation with a dominant, sexually aggressive adversary who appears to be evil. The challenge for the heroine is to conquer his heart, seduce him into falling in love with her, have him voluntarily make a lifetime commitment to her, and transform his apparent evil and cruelty into something more socially acceptable without diminishing his masculinity. In romance novels, rape is used as an effective means of creating excitement and dramatic tension. Hazen argues that, in the female imagination, shattered purity through violent sex is a primordial danger whose tension creates a powerful story.
  
  In romance novels the narrative structure allows the fantasy to continue to completion in marriage.

• Salmon, Catherine and Don Symons, "Slash fiction and human mating psychology," was published in the Journal of Sex Research in 2004 and can be found online:

  Before discussing slash and its fans, however, we first consider the general question of why human beings enjoy fiction at all. Our discussion is animated by the premises that mental phenomena, such as enjoyment, are the products of brain states and that the human brain, like every organ in every species, is the product of evolution by natural selection.

  and

  Written fiction probably contains elements of both engagement of organizing adaptations and of pleasure circuit lock-picking, and different kinds of fiction may contain different proportions. Perhaps "great" works of fiction are those that most fully engage organizing adaptations, which is why they have survived the tests of time and translation, while "lesser" fiction, including genre romance novels, may primarily pick the locks of the brain's pleasure circuits.
  
  THE NATURE OF THE GENRE ROMANCE NOVEL
  
  Romance novels have been called, with some justification, "women's pornography." [...] If we can persuade the reader that porn consists almost entirely of lock-picking rather than engagement of organizing adaptations, our subsequent argument that the same is true of genre romances may be more persuasive.

  While I cannot comment on the evolutionary biology underpinning these statements, I would like to challenge the classification of romance as a "lesser" form of fiction. It would appear to be based on an assumption that romance is read solely, or primarily, for different pleasures than those derived from more intellectual fiction. As I hope we've demonstrated on this blog, some (though certainly not all) romances can be extremely intellectually rewarding to a reader who approaches them with a mind which is respectfully open about their literary and intellectual merits. Salmon and Symons might also benefit from a little more thinking about how much intellectual activity can be involved in the writing and reading of porn. Pam Rosenthal, for example, has said that she

  come[s] out of that highfalutin French intellectual porn tradition. Story of O was absolutely formative for me in the 1960s, and so was Sontag's essay The Pornographic Imagination. I read a lot of the Marquis de Sade in my teens, too.
  
  And I've gotten a fair amount of mail from highly intellected porn readers as well

  In fact, Salmon and Symons would appear not to be aware of erotica and porn written by women, because on their list of "erotic genres [which] could exist, but to our knowledge, none of them does" they include

  Narratives with little development of character, plot, or setting in which heroines have brief, impersonal sexual encounters with attractive male strangers, with no obstacles, no falling in love, no strings attached, and no happily-ever-after endings (i.e., narratives that directly mimic male-oriented porn).

  Salmon and Symons seem aware only of women authors of romance novels: "What, then, actually does characterize women's erotic fiction? The genre romance novel has the following features. The goal of the heroine is never sex for its own sake, much less sex with strangers."

• A more recent, item which has already deeply irritated many romance readers is a study which, as reported by the BBC, found that "Watching romantic comedies can spoil your love life." The study's already been discussed at AAR and at the Smart Bitches'. It's probably worth acknowledging that research can sometimes be reported in the press in ways which lack the nuances present in the original. I'm not sure exactly which study is being referred to, but there are a variety of papers and other items on this and related issues which have been produced by members of Heriot-Watt's Family and Personal Relationship Laboratory. They are:
  
  • Holmes, B.M., & Johnson, K.R. (In Press). Adult attachment and romantic partner preference: A review. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
  • Johnson, K.R., & Holmes, B.M. (In Press). Contradictory messages: A content analysis of Hollywood-produced romantic comedy feature films. Communication Quarterly.
  • Holmes, B.M. (2007).In search of my "one and only": Romance-oriented media and beliefs in romantic relationships destiny. Electronic Journal of Communication, 17 (3).
  • Holmes, B.M. (2004). Romantic partner ideals and dysfunctional relationship beliefs cultivated through popular media messages: Implications for relationships satisfaction. Ann Arbor, MI: Proquest Information and Learning.
  
  I haven't had time to read these over (due to a need to get on with some of the items on my other lists). Does anyone else feel like taking on the task over the holidays?

• And finally some good news, via AAR's new blog,. The original source of the news has subsequently been deleted because, as Paula Guran explains,

  the numbers I was mentioning yesterday were compiled from the only the lists of the top fifty bestselling books for the week (in whatever the category and whatever week) on Bookscan — not ALL the books sold. Evidently, that was not clear — especially when taken out of context elsewhere.
  
  Second, I evidently was not supposed to put those figures “out into the media” at all. I didn’t put them “out into the media”. The media picked up a public posting. To me, there’s a difference, but evidently there is none to Bookscan and I see their point.

  However, they're still available at Galleycat: "compared to the first 49 weeks of 2007 [...] mass market paperback sales are up 14 percent—and overall romance sales are up 83 percent, with mass market paperbacks alone experiencing a 50 percent boost." I suspect those might be US figures, but romance seems to be doing well in the UK too: "The real winner in our economic meltdown, you see, is the book publisher Mills & Boon" (Black).

And that's the end of my list, and probably my last blog post of 2008. Happy Holidays!

1 April Gorry's Ph.D. thesis, "Leaving Home for Romance: Tourist Women's Adventures Abroad" (from the University of California Santa Barbara), is unpublished and therefore not readily available, but descriptions of her analysis of the heroes of romance novels can be found here and here. It should be noted that the thesis is not primarily about romance novels. The abstract of a conference paper presented by Gorry in 1995 gives an indication of the focus of her research:

the mating behavior of Caucasian tourist women vacationing in tropical locations such as the Caribbean, East Africa, Indonesia and Greece. The widespread occurrence of a phenomenon that cannot easily be explained by evolutionary theory makes female romance tourism worthy of ethnographic attention. An initial three month period of field research conducted in the Caribbean has revealed the following behavioral anomalies: tourist women tend to engage in more promiscuous behavior than they would at home, taking one or more different lovers in the span of a few days, choosing men of lower status than themselves, providing payment for "romantic services," and prioritizing male appearance and reputed love making ability over other mate selection criteria.

2 Salmon and Symons's book, Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality, while it includes statements about romance novels, seems to be only partially about them. The description of the book is as follows:

The stark contrasts between romance novels and pornography underscore how different female and male erotic fantasies are. [...] The authors focus particular attention on slash fiction, an erotic subgenre written by and for women and found on-line and in fan magazines. Slash—so-called for the punctuation mark indicating a romantic pair—depicts sexual relationships between heterosexual male television and film characters such as Starsky and Hutch (S/H) and Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock (K/S). Salmon and Symons argue that—despite some differences—slash fiction has much in common with romance novels. The authors examine the essential ingredients of female sexual fantasy and how slash fiction provides them.

The photo of the list is from Wikimedia Commons.

Sarah on Reviews, Analysis, and Ethics

Reprising the questions of (a) the difference between writing reviews and literary criticism and (b) categorising books as either "good" or "bad," Sarah explains at Dear Author why she's begun to write reviews at that website and how she now has "a number of moral dilemmas that I’m sure all baby reviewers go through as they learn (hopefully) how to be good and ethical reviewers."

A list of all Sarah's posts at Dear Author can be found here.


The photo was taken by Michal Maňas and is of

Lady Justice - allegory of Justice - statue at court building in [...] Svobody Street, Olomouc (Czech Republic). [...T]he statue was made by sculptor J. L. Urban. This image of Lady Justice lacks the typical blindfold and scales, replacing the latter with a book. (Wikipedia)

Come Now and Look at Me

Laura Vivanco

Not so long ago Jessica wrote a post titled "“Come for me, baby”: orgasm on command" in which she asked

Why is this phrase (and its variations) so ubiquitous in romance? You don’t believe me? Well, here’s a list complied ONLY from my bookshelf of maybe 30 titles. I bet you can think of many more.

Of course there's an element of dominance/control involved, and as Jessica asks, "was it the Office of Alpha Hero Protection that issued the dictum (heh) that in order to enhance Alphaness, heroes must control even this aspect of lovemaking?" But I suspect there might also be an element of bonding involved, of becoming, in the words of Matthew 19, and repeated in the marriage ceremony "one flesh."

Jessica's post reminded me of another frequent command issued by heroes, namely that the heroine look at him as she has her orgasm:

The blood was pounding in his head, roaring in his ears, yet his body continued to move slowly with hers. Balanced on the edge, David said her name a last time.
"Aurora, look at me." When her eyes opened, they were dark and aware. "I want to see where I take you." (Roberts 591)

And here's a similar example:

Byron realized suddenly that it was not enough for there to be pleasure given and taken. He wanted Victoria to be aware of him, as aware of him as a man as he was of her as a woman. She was beautiful like that [...] beautiful with her tightness clasping him intimately, as if she would turn them both into one marvelous animal. But he did not want her to plunge into ecstasy alone. He wanted her with him as she went over the edge - he wanted to be a part of that beauty at its climax. [...] "I'm here," he whispered. "Look at me. Remember - I am with you."
She opened her eyes and met his gaze. "For now," she agreed. (Joyce 67)

Again, I think the command is part of an attempt to bond the two more closely. I wonder if there's any lingering literary and emotional significance derived from much earlier medical/scientific ideas about the power of the eyes. In the Renaissance it was thought that eyes could potentially have a powerful effect:

"Love's arrows," held in high esteem by the French poets of the Pleiade, were not, for Ficino, a mere metaphor. They were equipped with invisible pneumatic tips able to inflict severe damage on the person shot. Had not Plato already said that love was a kind of ocular sickness (ophthalmia: Phaedo, 255c-d)? And did not Plutarch ascribe to sight a "miraculous force"?
Regarding the "evil eye," fascination or jettatura, its etiology is the same:

Fascination is a force which, emanating from the spirit of the fascinator, enters the eyes of the fascinated person and penetrates his heart. Spirit is therefore the instrument of fascination. It emits from the eyes rays resembling itself, bearing with them spiritual quality. [...]

So speaks Agrippa of Nettesheim, after Ficino. (Culianu 30)

As mentioned above, this scientific explanation of the function of the gaze influenced literature:

In late medieval literature [...] the arrow does not always proceed directly to the heart, but strikes the lover first in the eyes. This bizarre trajectory becomes more comprehensible when we realize that the poets have associated the arrow of Love with either the glance or the image of the beloved, which enters through the lover's eyes but pierces deep within. (Stewart 13)

Donaldson-Evans clarifies that this imagery has a very long literary history:

when love is born not simply as a result of seeing the Beloved but by the active participation of the Beloved's glance, then we are dealing with a specific tradition which can be traced back to early Greek classical literature. It is, in fact, a topos which, since it has gone unnamed until now, we propose to call the Aggressive Eye Topos. (202)

Its scientific basis, according to Donaldson-Evans, contributed to its longevity:

such imagery is rooted in a theory of vision which extended from classical antiquity up to the seventeenth century. This scientific authority (it is only for us that it is pseudo-scientific) undoubtedly accounts for the popularity and extraordinary longevity of this particular literary tradition. (203)

I'd like to suggest that, even if we would now consider the scientific authority underpinning the Aggressive Eye topos to be merely archaic pseudo-science, the tradition perhaps lives on in literary form in the romance genre. Heroes who ask or command heroines to look deep into their eyes seem to be trying to create an emotional connection (they may not at this point think of it as love) between them. When the hero ensures that they orgasm together while looking into each others eyes, he is perhaps trying to join them both physically and optically (body and soul), and in coming together in this way they are perhaps almost literally made, at least for a short space of time, into "one flesh."

• Culianu, Ioan P. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Trans. Margaret Cook. U of Chicago P: 1987.
• Donaldson-Evans, Lance K. "Love's Fatal Glance: Eye Imagery and Maurice Scève's Délie." Neophilologus 62:2 (1978): 202-211.
• Joyce, Lydia. The Veil of Night. New York: Signet, 2005.
• Roberts, Nora. Mind over Matter. 1987. Going Home. Richmond, Surrey: Silhouette, 2004. 401-649.
• Stewart, Dana E. The Arrow of Love: Optics, Gender, and Subjectivity in Medieval Love Poetry. Bucknell UP: 2003.

The image of the eye is from Wikimedia Commons.