Romance X: Love Theory, Romance Practice
This Modern Love: representations of romantic love in historical romance
(
Jodi McAlister, Macquarie University)
Historical romance is one of the most popular and recognisable
sub-genres of the romance novel. The period setting is key to the
construction of the romance: historical heroines often find themselves
bound by more restrictive social rules than their contemporary sisters,
particularly when it comes to appropriate female sexual behaviour.
This rather Foucauldian notion of a repressive society has an
interesting effect on the portrayal of romantic love. While historical
heroines often break the rules of their own societies, I contend that
they regularly follow recommended contemporary patterns for romance,
especially when it comes to the relationship between love and sex. The
picture of romantic love offered by the historical romance is distinctly
modern, despite the effort authors make to create historically accurate
backdrops for their novels. In this paper, I will draw on the history
of romantic love and several key texts to discuss the ways in which the
historical romance regularly portrays romantic love as transhistorical
and universal, as well as how this has changed over the genre’s history.
I will explore the scripts for love and sex followed by several
historical heroines, and will ultimately attempt to draw some
conclusions as to the appeal of modern love in a period setting.
Outsmarting the Universe: Precocious Love in John Green’s Fault in Our Stars
(
Susan Leary, University of Miami, English Department )
John Green’s 2012 bestselling young adult novel,
Fault in Our Stars,
introduces teenage cancer patients, Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus
Waters, who fall in love over the shared experience of knowing they are
going to die. There are all the elements of the cloying sweet,
love-turned-tragic archetypal romance, yet the intellectual backdrop and
smart wit of the characters transforms this love into one that resists
such categorization: Hazel and Augustus bond over a deep fascination
with Hazel’s favorite book,
Imperial Affliction; they
correspond sophisticatedly with its sardonic and cerebral author; they
speak in metaphor, converse routinely with philosophical language, and
kiss passionately in the midst of their touring the Anne Frank House.
Yet, Hazel and Augustus are not standard nerds, nor are they the
sympathetically-viewed cancer kids. Their intelligence in fact protects
them from these labels. The universe, however, is believed to be an
ordered system. As Hazel’s father says: “I believe the universe wants
to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward
consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe
enjoys its elegance being observed.” Love, cast as an intellectualized
experience, is this consciousness. I call this
precocious love
because it is a love ahead of its own image; it only approximates love
as it contains no elements of the artificiality we read into the
idea and
potential
of it to organize experience. In this way, Hazel and Augustus succeed
in outsmarting the universe as how they feel about one another is
archetype-less, lens-less, unqualified, and unprecedented—unprecedented
being Augustus’s most frequent descriptor of Hazel. The universe’s
elegance is therefore an illusion of perfect order; even in his eulogy
for Hazel, Augustus equates his love for her to “stars he cannot fathom
into constellations.” It is this intellectuality that makes love a
simultaneous maker and unmaker of the universe.
Redeeming (M/M) Love: Christian Romance and Erotic Faith in Alex Beecroft's False Colors and Alexis Hall's Glitterland
(
Eric Selinger, DePaul University)
As Catherine Roach, Simon May, and other scholars have argued,
popular romance culture draws on a long post-Christian tradition of
thought about romantic love as a source of transcendent meaning,
purpose, and value in life: an “erotic faith,” in Robert Polhemus’s
phrase, that true love unites sacred and secular desires, erotic and
matrimonial relationships, and, fundamentally, body and soul. Some
queer romance novels engage with this faith tradition in particularly
self-conscious and artful ways, whether by asserting the power of
“erotic faith” to trump social and Biblical injunctions against same-sex
romantic love or by reasserting the value of "erotic faith" in the face
of the postmodern intellectual turn that characterises romantic
love--especially with a happy ending--as a banal or déclassé ideal.
This presentation will look closely at the ways two m/m romance novels
think through ideas about love and erotic faith, often in explicitly
theological terms: Alex Beecroft’s progressive Christian m/m romance,
False Colors; and Alexis Hall’s ostensibly secular m/m novel
Glitterland, whose self-conscious, self-doubting narrator invokes both
Christian tropes and the critical work of Roland Barthes as he struggles
to accept his own romantic redemption, at once redeemed by and
redeeming love.
The Matter of Romantic Love Matters
(
Morgan Klarich, Texas Woman's University)
Romance novels are made up of matter and can become an actant in the
reader’s own narrative as they navigate their own fantasy and
inter/intra-action with matter. Western philosophies (like materialism)
tend to ignore romantic love as an ontologically relevant philosophical
space. Romantic love is considered an emotion, and not relevant to the
philosophical discourse of classical materialism. However, using new
materialism I wish to challenge that and critically interrogate the
validity of romantic love’s exclusion in this discourse. Using romance
novels as a crucial point in my interrogation, my paper explores the
possibility that romantic love is matter, an independent complicated
product of physical matters intra-action. Among others, I utilize
discourse from new materialists and romance novel scholars. I conclude
that the old opinions towards matter cannot apply to the modern way of
thinking. There is little room for absolutes when so much is clearly
unknown about what matter actually is. Romantic love is that unknown,
unseen, and uncharted territory of philosophical discourse that can and
will be considered, not only a product of matter, but matter itself.
