From the issue dated August 15, 2003
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Sweet, Savage Academe: True Confessions of a Pulp ProfessorBy LEE TOBIN McCLAINEven though popular fiction has become more academically respectable in recent years, focusing on it can still seem hazardous to a professor's career. Studying a genre as devalued as romance is particularly fraught with difficulty, and writing romance has a reputation even below analyzing it. But if popular fiction is your passion, working with it can be both productive and playful. In fact, popular fiction can provide a useful window into the scholarly world. As a romance-writing academic, I offer the following lessons for those who want to follow this treacherous path. Lesson one: Be yourself. I always felt I should be a serious scholar. When I was in graduate school, I specialized in medieval studies partly because of how rigorous the specialty seemed. The only topic that gave me any kind of joy, however, was Arthuriana, which allowed me to read Marion Zimmer Bradley's historical fiction about the Arthurian legend and watch movies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail. That passion propelled me into a dissertation on Arthurian romance in medieval, Victorian, and contemporary literature. In 1989, two years before I finished my doctorate, I wrote and published a Silhouette Romance. Since then I've published short romantic fiction and academic articles. Now that I've confessed what really interests me, I find that ideas for essays and conference papers come easily, scholarship is enjoyable, and teaching, research, and service interact in a way that's productive for me and for my university. Although my more traditional colleagues still occasionally question my work, I've been surprisingly successful in converting them. Telling the truth about myself instead of pretending to be someone I'm not has paid off. Lesson two: Know your genre's academic history -- and take advantage of it. When I was in graduate school, in the 1980s, critics of literature regarded writing and reading romances as taboo. Germaine Greer wrote that romance was about women's "cherishing the chains of their bondage." Tania Modleski illuminated how some women compulsively read romance after romance, hoping that their abusive mates would someday transform themselves into kind heroes, as domineering males in romance fiction did. Janice Radway, who studied readers and their responses to romances, contended that the novels could, at best, help women adapt to limited lives. As Kay Mussell now summarizes the early feminist views -- including her own -- critics in the 1980s saw romances as patriarchal texts that helped reconcile women to their limited social condition. In the 1990s, romantic fiction became more acceptable to scholars. Popular novels from the past, like The Wide Wide World and The Mysteries of Udolpho, had become objects of legitimate study; some were described as neglected victims of a patriarchal scholarly system. Then Jayne Ann Krentz published her 1992 edited collection, Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of Romance, and feminist critics seemed to take a collective gasp. Had our negative analyses of romance fiction been examples of women hating? Had we been devaluing women's work? At last, it was hip to like romance. In 1997, a special issue of the journal Paradoxa came out in favor of the genre. Some of the smartest critics wrote about how romance worked, what it meant to them personally and to women in general, and what subversive strides its authors had made. They showed that beneath the apparent conservatism and submission of romance lurked wild women freely exploring their sexuality, exploiting men, speaking out, acting up. The sea change was fabulous for me. Here I was, a junior professor at a small liberal-arts college -- a women's college, no less -- and I could acknowledge my now-not-so-sordid romance-writing past. I could teach courses on romance. I could develop a graduate program focused on writing popular fiction and influence the hiring of other genre-fiction writers. Best of all, I could take up romance writing again, in a more public way. Lesson three: Relish the discourse gap. One of the most intellectually productive challenges about being a pulp professor is the conflict of mindsets. Popular fiction requires certainty, or apparent certainty, about values. Academic life, on the other hand, thrives on skepticism, multiplicity, and ambiguity. One of my early mentors, Lisa Kiser, introduced me to graduate study of English literature by explaining that "we walk around the halls being ironic with each other." Irony, though, as Northrup Frye explained so well, is a different mode from romance. For example: "Of course I believe in true love" is a taken-for-granted statement at a romance-writers' convention. But saying "Of course I believe in true love" sounds inappropriate at an institution of higher learning. There, I would question the assumptions of any freshman who uttered such a platitude. In my romance mode, I might create an academic heroine whose logical skepticism is swept away by a rugged hero's masculine force; in my ironic mode, I might deconstruct a romance-writers' convention. Although the gap between creating and dissecting popular culture can seem enormous, crossing it regularly is good exercise. It keeps one nimble. And, as always, keeping a foot on each side of the border gives a better view of the scholarly and creative terrain. Lesson four: Watch your timing. More than any other type of writing, romance reflects its readers' cultures and expressed desires. That is one reason why it's hard to be up to date in analyzing romance. Just when the first scholars on romance figured out the dark, violent heroes who loomed over vulnerable ingenues in the Harlequins and gothics of the 1970s, the novels began to shift toward more equity between heroes and heroines, and more variety in characters' age, occupation, and personality type. In the 1980s, romance readers got jobs, and romances began portraying executive heroines and "Mr. Mom" heroes. By the time critics began to celebrate those newly sensitive heroes in the 1990s, the beta male plummeted in popularity, and now we're back to alpha males and gothic-style romantic suspense. If scholars are unaware of the constantly changing nature of romance fiction, they may not bother to look at the latest romances. Sometimes, too, they look at just a few novels and assume that all other romances are the same. Thus, it is rare for an academic to know a literary genre as well as a fan does. Scholars continually commit the faux pas of the uneducated by applying real-world criteria to the fantasy world of romance. Here is where the pulp professor has an advantage; as scholar and fan, her double vision sees more clearly. Lesson five: Recognize that writing pulp fiction is fun. When I write academic prose, scholarly tradition continually drives me to check my work and correct it. I feel much freer when I write romances. In addition, academics rarely experience the cachet associated with writing the kind of books that sell. My acquaintances outside academe were much more impressed when I published a romance than when I got a Ph.D. Finally, there is the tantalizing connection between romance and sex. Although my fiction is tame in that regard, it's still sexier than the typical scholarly text. My participation in the comparatively dry world of scholarship makes me tolerant of the jokes that irritate many full-time romance writers (like the question, "How do you do your research?" -- always delivered with a nudge and a sly laugh). Romance research offers a whiff of perfume, sweat, and pleasure that can feel freeing because it is so nonacademic. Lesson six: Let your scholarly work support your creative writing. Studying romance as a scholar has helped me become a better romance writer. I say that with some amazement because the writing styles are so different, and the worldviews so at odds. But some of my most important creative insights stem from taking an academic approach to popular culture. While I was working on a scholarly book on romance, I came across Robert Warshow's analysis of film in his book, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture. He argues that within a genre, "originality is to be welcomed only in the degree that it intensifies the expected experience without fundamentally altering it." The concept gave me an immediate epiphany about why certain of my innovative ideas for romance plots wouldn't work. Romance editors' desire for manuscripts that are "fresh," yet fit the formula, had previously frustrated me. It was Warshow who showed me the way out of the paradox. I can be original only if I deliver, faithfully, the central emotional experience that romance readers have paid for: That's the implied contract of every $4.95 romance novel. From John Cawelti's seminal work on genre fiction, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, I came to understand another important point: the distinction between specific cultural conventions (in romance, the "brides, babies, and cowboys" triad currently beloved by readers and editors) and universal archetypes (man and woman overcome obstacles and live happily ever after). Many romance writers are sick of writing about cowboys, but are dedicated to ending books with marriages; they know they'd be out of a job without that happy-ever-after ending. Many feminist critics oppose the larger archetype -- the idea that a woman's happy ending necessarily involves heterosexual marriage. As someone walking the border between the two camps, I've learned what I can change (the specific cultural conventions) and what I can't (the larger archetype). My feminism is tempered by this undisputed fact: 54.5 percent of all popular paperback fiction sold in North America show men and women getting together happily as the grand prize. Ideological concerns aside, that's apparently what most folks want. Lesson seven: Let your creative work support your scholarly writing. I have also learned much from popular fiction that I now apply to my scholarly work. For example, I place a higher value on catching readers' attention than I once did. I try to start with a bang and end with a cliffhanger, because that's what most people like. I take more risks -- like telling personal stories, adding racy lines, and using a tongue-in-cheek "how-to" format to package a serious study. Writing popular fiction has also increased my speed of writing scholarly work, which means that I have enough time to do both. Let me explain with a rather bizarre example from romance writers' culture: the Book-in-a-Week phenomenon. Book-in-a-Week at first seems like impossibly stereotypical romance-writing behavior. Writers challenge one another to write as many pages as possible each day for a week and then post the results online. While most participants don't actually complete a book, some do. Can this work be high quality? Actually, it can. Admit it: Much of the time when we are "writing," we're really just staring at the computer screen. Trying to write madly without concern for quality is something we tell every freshman-comp student to do in free-writing exercises. Such strategies work for academic writers too, as Robert Boice has shown in his Professors as Writers. Participating in Book-in-a-Week events loosened me up. I got into a much faster creative mode, and I never slowed all the way back down for scholarly work. Lesson eight: Don't worry about what your colleagues think. In the early days of my career, I worried too much about upturned noses from colleagues; after my secret romance writing was discovered, I got far more positive attention than scorn. The admiration is often covert -- a whispered "How much did you make on that romance novel, anyway?" or "You know, I've got a mystery manuscript in a bottom drawer myself." Some academics may be snobs about my writing pulp fiction, but others find it exotic -- and fascinating. The only overt disapproval I've ever gotten has come from writers of literary fiction who resent, understandably, the greater material success associated with romance writing. I realize that there may be hidden opposition to pulp professors; for example, I suspect that a temporary setback in my recent promotion to full professor had to do with my racy field of study. Over all, I feel fortunate to work at an institution that guards the cultural borders between popular and high culture lightly. Of course, each scholar-writer has to evaluate his or her personal goals and decide what balance to strike. In the end, I've found my career as a romance-writing scholar to be extraordinarily rewarding. I believe there's a larger lesson here, too. With its various barriers to entry and advancement, academe sometimes appears to stifle individuality. That hasn't been the case for me. While I began my pulp career with fear and trembling, I've come further and further out of the closet as I've climbed the academic ladder. Now, I wouldn't trade my work -- creative or critical -- for any number of accolades in The Chaucer Review. I'm still not sure I'm a serious scholar, but I have enough fun playing at scholarship that I never want to go back to working at it. Lee Tobin McClain is director of the master's program in writing popular fiction at Seton Hill University. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 49, Page B19
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education