Serious & Smut: Reading Romance
If romance novels account for 25% of all books and 50% of mass-market books sold just in the US, our course asks what even is “romance.” We will examine this genre’s history, popularity, and overwhelmingly gendered marketing and readership. Our course will analyze what makes a genre—in this case, romance—and how romance as “genre fiction” has taken its present shape. We will look at the contemporary popularity and accompanying disdain associated with romance alongside the genre’s historical antecedents. We will not only read romances popularized by BookTok and Bookstagram, but also examine the evolution of the tropes that have come to define this genre. Overall, we will question the divide between “serious” and “smut,” “literary” fiction and “genre” fiction, and ultimately take stock of the gulf between literature and literary criticism.
You can read all about popular romance tropes on our “Tropestagram” page here, and hear me talk about the course in the video embedded on the left (or above, depending on the device you are on).
Image Details: Marc Chagall, Birthday (1915), artchive.net.
The Feminine Urge to Be Mad: Women and Anger
This course is about women who are often considered mad, bad, and even ungendered by their anger. We will look at enraged women inside and outside the literary world. Angry women, we will see, are frequently represented by drawing on racial stereotypes and in ways that sharply contrast the depiction of angry men. For instance, whereas proud and angry Achilles becomes an epic hero in Homer’s Iliad, tennis champion Serena Williams’s pride and anger at the 2018 U.S. Open finals was repeatedly penalized as inappropriate. Even as we live in a time when women are no longer expected to be submissive and passive, women who refuse to subdue their anger are still seen as disruptive, unstable, and problematic. If women breaking their silence about the wrongs that they have quietly endured are ostracized, demonized, and punished, then what are the acceptable ways to express one’s anger? This course will investigate the gendered politics of anger in literature and culture, grappling with such questions in the aftermath of #MeToo. What can anger do for us now? Does this anger take different shapes in different communities and places? In 2025, can this anger be an instrument of hope?