More from Kamble
Oct. 10th, 2021 02:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutThis page is _wild_.
Kindle thinks this is page 26-28 or whatever.
This sentence makes zero sense: “This broadening of the genre testifies to the fact that romance publishing is a multi-billion dollar industry today.” No, it really does not. You can have line extension in small industries and it can be absent in gargantuan ones. Whatever.
“Consequently, the influence of the profit-motive on the content of romance fiction cannot be overestimated.”
Actually, the profit motive _can_ be overestimated. Overestimating of the profit motive occurs every time someone says, no, we won’t do that because it won’t sell, and then the person with the thing goes elsewhere and makes a metric mooseload of money on it. You _can_ overestimate the profit motive.
It is “crucial to recognize that the industry is involved in the distribution of novels that are being reshaped continually by its writers (as seen in the above example of Kleypas’s work) and by its readers, often in ways that subvert standardization. The fantasy at the core of the genre romance appears to be conservative, invested in preserving a social structure that supports consumer capitalism and bougeois mores. But the romantic plot does not equate to a monolithic politics; instead, it treats as legitimate the voices that are suspicious of accepted wisdom on globalization, preemptive military strikes and espionage, and the traditional family. While mass culture critiques (such as Lazardsfeld and Merton or Adorno), have often found such a polyvalent nature to be a proof of mass culture’s role as ideology that keeps in place the conditions that are necessary for the continued existence of capitalism, such a perspective is an injustice to the genre. As Herbert Mancuse has argued in The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, the tendency to treat cultural production as dangerous if it is not directly working to overthrow advanced capitalism and its instruments denies the value of the negating impulses in such art. Romance fiction may not be directly revolutionary but my reading suggests that in many instances, its “strong affirmative tendencies toward reconciliation with the established reality coexist with the rebellious ones”. The plasticity of the novel form allows the genre to keep alive the “rebellious tendencies” that express a critique of a postindustrial, postfeminist, post-World War era.”
Look, I’ve read a lot of scholarly work. I know what this is and why it is here: thesis advisor(s) said explain how this fits into a blahdeblahblah theoretical framework. To Kamble’s credit, a _lot_ got packed into a comparatively small amount of space, so you can just let your eyes skip right over that and move on. But what’s actually being responded to here is _completely_ _batshit_ _insane_. Why is one of the few, academic books on the topic of popular romantic fiction having to justify romance novels for not being sufficiently revolutionary? In the Marxist sense! Are there _really_ _no_ _other_ _available_ _frameworks_?!? Were none of them willing to be an advisor on this committee? WTF?
ETA:
It. Gets. Weirder.!!!
The next chunk of Kamble is a recapitulation of Fredric Jameson’s analysis of Wuthering Heights. “As Jameson notes, Heathcliff, disguised as the protagonist/hero who disrupts the narrative with his sexual passion, in fact represents capitalist energy crashing into an agrarian world, heralding the new economic order.” Oh, and does it go on! Ending with: “In other words, Wuthering Heights is not quite able to break away from the model in which the romantic hero is part of the landed gentry, but it nevertheless upsets his earlier unquestioned primacy by presenting Squire Linton with a powerful rival whose wealth comes from unknown origins, that is, a proto-capitalist.”
SERIOUSLY. An analysis of a novel characterized by all kinds of crazy has somehow been converted into _an economic allegory_.
Anyway. My theory about that paragraph was clearly wrong. Kamble says this next:
“My own reading of romance novels as scribes of the impact of advanced capitalism models itself on Jameson’s analysis of Wuthering Heights. This is an attempt to correct the traditional neglect of romance fiction’s role in documenting the sociological ramifications of the grown of imperial and global capitalism.”
I dunno. I’ll play along for a while, but I’m not particularly optimistic. The glory that is the romance fiction industry is that it basically is one of the very few parts of our world that takes seriously women’s work in depicting, supporting, nurturing, etc. human relationships in the day-to-day world.
ETAYA: So, she’s totally going for it.
“The genre presents this economic system as the prerequisite for happiness by repeatedly endorsing a relationship between it (in the body of the hero) and the petite bourgeoisie and the proletariat (in the body of the heroine).”
I mean, if you take that to its logical conclusion in the idea of the necessity of class warfare and the end goal being a paradise for the proletariat, this does NOT bode well for the hero, or, for that matter, the heroine. I mean, in this analysis, she’s two of the three groups.
Later: “Romance fiction is rarely read in this light.” Truer words.
ETA still more:
OK, at what kindle says is about 20% of the way into the book, Kamble is doing pretty detailed analysis of the Mills and Boon submission guidelines that emphasized the hero should be a jet-setting, and then into a particular instance (Posession by Charlotte Lamb — no, not the thing by Byatt you’ve heard of). Kamble uses a history of Mills and Boons (by McAleer — haven’t read it) to argue that the industrialist / capitalist hero / worker or member of family business heroine that is about to be rolled by the hero (har de har har my joke not Kambles) was a strategy prompted by the editor’s of women’s magazines that were going to serialize the novels. Basically, this is what What Does the Reader Want looked like at that point in time. Unfortunately, this winds up summarized as, “The subsequent loss of jobs [to Thatchter’s politics] and the assault on employees’ bargaining capacity is represented in these novels through the heroine’s precarious situation in the hero’s sphere of influence.”
Yes, because fiction written by women, according to guidelines designed by women editors of women’s magazines, intended to be consumed by women, and which guidelines were intended to maximize uptake by those women, is fundamentally all about men losing their jobs. Sure. I definitely believe that. *Sigh*
Some of this is pretty amazeballs: “But the presence of hostile exchanges and anxiety in these novels and the relatively limited narrative space given to the “happy end” suggests that the Harlequin Mills and Boon series was voicing the conflicted British response to the gradual dismantling of the welfare state, the privileging of employer interests over those of employees, and the increasing bent toward privatization in the postwar years.”
That is _for sure_ the takeaway from series Harlequins. “Relatively limited narrative space”? Everyone knows that if you expand on that HEA, it’s a whole new novel with a whole new set of conflicts. Come on.
OK, but this bit is awesome! We’ve all read books which were non-stop mean-spirited conflict and then boom, clinch, they are all happy now. Not. Plausible. Well, here is Kamble’s explanation: “it is a symptom of the untenable nature of the populist unity Thatcherism attempted to create, aligning dominated classes with the dominant.” I mean, duh! “The end of the novel fails to create a happy resolution to their opposed positions — and thus leaves a lingering awareness of Thatcherism’s sleight of hand.”
Honestly, I think that a Jane Ward _Tragedy of Heterosexuality_ is a better explanation for this whole problem. There are a bunch of people who want to have sex with members of a group of people they don’t like very much. It’s a problem in terms of helping them get along in a committed relationship.
I wish I could tell _for sure_ whether or not Kamble is doing this with crazy eyes and a finger shaky, Aha, but wait! I can make your literary theory seem even _stupider_, just see what I do with it next! Or if she is doing this with the kind of pedantic sincerity that everyone else in academe does it with.
If she is doing this to make the whole thing implode under the weight of its own nonsense, then, go you! Make it choke on its own bullshit.
More:
I cannot be quoting the whole thing, however, here is an exceptional sentence!
“The persistent awareness that capitalism is not a natural state of affairs, expressed here in the contempt aristocratic characters exhibit toward it, is worth noting because this is how the critique of capitalism (arising out of Marxist and postcolonial studies and antiglobalization rhetoric in the media) makes its way into the genre.”
!!!
OK, I _do_ understand that in romance novels with historical elements there is a Thing, which can be roughly summarized as, We Are a People of Leisure, You May Not Dirty Your Hands with Work. It is fine to manage the estates, and you can even maybe take an active interest in Improvements on the land, but you cannot be owning factories and also a member of the landed / leisure / wtf. The landed / leisure / wtf will take your money, tho, which is where this amazing sentence arises. HOWEVER, as near as I can tell, the motive for No Working! Comes from a super weird agrarian cosplay. Suggesting that the Pro Agrarian Crowd’s contempt for Industry is somehow a critique of capitalism that could be conceived of as Marxist is …. Soooooo odd.
OK, so, the chapter on capitalists has wrapped up. Honestly, it would have been a much better chapter if it had adopted an Obama-era tone of managed capitalism, vs. laissez-faire capitalism. Virtually all of the examples cited are examples in which the capitalist-hero’s behavior is at least somewhat mitigated / or found to not be as bad as it seemed initially, and so many of the marriages have explicit Rules of the Game embedded in them. Seems like a better, easier mapping, but whatever.
The next chapter is on soldiers, and I’m here initially to complain about inappropriate hyphenation. Not the author’s fault, and probably a fault of some sort of automated thing, but you really should not break Wynnegate Sahib as Wynneg-ate Sahib. That is Wrong.
Unlike the previous chapter, which had very aggressive interpretations of the hero embodying one class and the heroine two others, this chapter spends a lot of time saying that books with soldier-heroes are not … whatever.
“The established belief that capitalism is coterminous with democracy while communism is tyrannical is not scrutinized — the novel’s negation of one aspect of the ideology coexists with its affirmation of another.”
Honestly, there were some really amazing observations in the previous chapter about poor(er) heroines and rich(er) heroes, and that stock bit in which he lavishes wtf on her (mandatory sessions at the spa! Shopping for an entire wardrobe! Gem encrusted gowns!) begged for a lot more analysis. I would have _loved_ to see an analysis that went something like: rich men (capital class) elevate tokens from the working class to show that social mobility is a real thing and if you don’t pull it off yourself it must be something wrong with you … even tho there are never really enough Dukes or Billionaires for everyone to marry one.
Kindle thinks this is page 26-28 or whatever.
This sentence makes zero sense: “This broadening of the genre testifies to the fact that romance publishing is a multi-billion dollar industry today.” No, it really does not. You can have line extension in small industries and it can be absent in gargantuan ones. Whatever.
“Consequently, the influence of the profit-motive on the content of romance fiction cannot be overestimated.”
Actually, the profit motive _can_ be overestimated. Overestimating of the profit motive occurs every time someone says, no, we won’t do that because it won’t sell, and then the person with the thing goes elsewhere and makes a metric mooseload of money on it. You _can_ overestimate the profit motive.
It is “crucial to recognize that the industry is involved in the distribution of novels that are being reshaped continually by its writers (as seen in the above example of Kleypas’s work) and by its readers, often in ways that subvert standardization. The fantasy at the core of the genre romance appears to be conservative, invested in preserving a social structure that supports consumer capitalism and bougeois mores. But the romantic plot does not equate to a monolithic politics; instead, it treats as legitimate the voices that are suspicious of accepted wisdom on globalization, preemptive military strikes and espionage, and the traditional family. While mass culture critiques (such as Lazardsfeld and Merton or Adorno), have often found such a polyvalent nature to be a proof of mass culture’s role as ideology that keeps in place the conditions that are necessary for the continued existence of capitalism, such a perspective is an injustice to the genre. As Herbert Mancuse has argued in The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, the tendency to treat cultural production as dangerous if it is not directly working to overthrow advanced capitalism and its instruments denies the value of the negating impulses in such art. Romance fiction may not be directly revolutionary but my reading suggests that in many instances, its “strong affirmative tendencies toward reconciliation with the established reality coexist with the rebellious ones”. The plasticity of the novel form allows the genre to keep alive the “rebellious tendencies” that express a critique of a postindustrial, postfeminist, post-World War era.”
Look, I’ve read a lot of scholarly work. I know what this is and why it is here: thesis advisor(s) said explain how this fits into a blahdeblahblah theoretical framework. To Kamble’s credit, a _lot_ got packed into a comparatively small amount of space, so you can just let your eyes skip right over that and move on. But what’s actually being responded to here is _completely_ _batshit_ _insane_. Why is one of the few, academic books on the topic of popular romantic fiction having to justify romance novels for not being sufficiently revolutionary? In the Marxist sense! Are there _really_ _no_ _other_ _available_ _frameworks_?!? Were none of them willing to be an advisor on this committee? WTF?
ETA:
It. Gets. Weirder.!!!
The next chunk of Kamble is a recapitulation of Fredric Jameson’s analysis of Wuthering Heights. “As Jameson notes, Heathcliff, disguised as the protagonist/hero who disrupts the narrative with his sexual passion, in fact represents capitalist energy crashing into an agrarian world, heralding the new economic order.” Oh, and does it go on! Ending with: “In other words, Wuthering Heights is not quite able to break away from the model in which the romantic hero is part of the landed gentry, but it nevertheless upsets his earlier unquestioned primacy by presenting Squire Linton with a powerful rival whose wealth comes from unknown origins, that is, a proto-capitalist.”
SERIOUSLY. An analysis of a novel characterized by all kinds of crazy has somehow been converted into _an economic allegory_.
Anyway. My theory about that paragraph was clearly wrong. Kamble says this next:
“My own reading of romance novels as scribes of the impact of advanced capitalism models itself on Jameson’s analysis of Wuthering Heights. This is an attempt to correct the traditional neglect of romance fiction’s role in documenting the sociological ramifications of the grown of imperial and global capitalism.”
I dunno. I’ll play along for a while, but I’m not particularly optimistic. The glory that is the romance fiction industry is that it basically is one of the very few parts of our world that takes seriously women’s work in depicting, supporting, nurturing, etc. human relationships in the day-to-day world.
ETAYA: So, she’s totally going for it.
“The genre presents this economic system as the prerequisite for happiness by repeatedly endorsing a relationship between it (in the body of the hero) and the petite bourgeoisie and the proletariat (in the body of the heroine).”
I mean, if you take that to its logical conclusion in the idea of the necessity of class warfare and the end goal being a paradise for the proletariat, this does NOT bode well for the hero, or, for that matter, the heroine. I mean, in this analysis, she’s two of the three groups.
Later: “Romance fiction is rarely read in this light.” Truer words.
ETA still more:
OK, at what kindle says is about 20% of the way into the book, Kamble is doing pretty detailed analysis of the Mills and Boon submission guidelines that emphasized the hero should be a jet-setting, and then into a particular instance (Posession by Charlotte Lamb — no, not the thing by Byatt you’ve heard of). Kamble uses a history of Mills and Boons (by McAleer — haven’t read it) to argue that the industrialist / capitalist hero / worker or member of family business heroine that is about to be rolled by the hero (har de har har my joke not Kambles) was a strategy prompted by the editor’s of women’s magazines that were going to serialize the novels. Basically, this is what What Does the Reader Want looked like at that point in time. Unfortunately, this winds up summarized as, “The subsequent loss of jobs [to Thatchter’s politics] and the assault on employees’ bargaining capacity is represented in these novels through the heroine’s precarious situation in the hero’s sphere of influence.”
Yes, because fiction written by women, according to guidelines designed by women editors of women’s magazines, intended to be consumed by women, and which guidelines were intended to maximize uptake by those women, is fundamentally all about men losing their jobs. Sure. I definitely believe that. *Sigh*
Some of this is pretty amazeballs: “But the presence of hostile exchanges and anxiety in these novels and the relatively limited narrative space given to the “happy end” suggests that the Harlequin Mills and Boon series was voicing the conflicted British response to the gradual dismantling of the welfare state, the privileging of employer interests over those of employees, and the increasing bent toward privatization in the postwar years.”
That is _for sure_ the takeaway from series Harlequins. “Relatively limited narrative space”? Everyone knows that if you expand on that HEA, it’s a whole new novel with a whole new set of conflicts. Come on.
OK, but this bit is awesome! We’ve all read books which were non-stop mean-spirited conflict and then boom, clinch, they are all happy now. Not. Plausible. Well, here is Kamble’s explanation: “it is a symptom of the untenable nature of the populist unity Thatcherism attempted to create, aligning dominated classes with the dominant.” I mean, duh! “The end of the novel fails to create a happy resolution to their opposed positions — and thus leaves a lingering awareness of Thatcherism’s sleight of hand.”
Honestly, I think that a Jane Ward _Tragedy of Heterosexuality_ is a better explanation for this whole problem. There are a bunch of people who want to have sex with members of a group of people they don’t like very much. It’s a problem in terms of helping them get along in a committed relationship.
I wish I could tell _for sure_ whether or not Kamble is doing this with crazy eyes and a finger shaky, Aha, but wait! I can make your literary theory seem even _stupider_, just see what I do with it next! Or if she is doing this with the kind of pedantic sincerity that everyone else in academe does it with.
If she is doing this to make the whole thing implode under the weight of its own nonsense, then, go you! Make it choke on its own bullshit.
More:
I cannot be quoting the whole thing, however, here is an exceptional sentence!
“The persistent awareness that capitalism is not a natural state of affairs, expressed here in the contempt aristocratic characters exhibit toward it, is worth noting because this is how the critique of capitalism (arising out of Marxist and postcolonial studies and antiglobalization rhetoric in the media) makes its way into the genre.”
!!!
OK, I _do_ understand that in romance novels with historical elements there is a Thing, which can be roughly summarized as, We Are a People of Leisure, You May Not Dirty Your Hands with Work. It is fine to manage the estates, and you can even maybe take an active interest in Improvements on the land, but you cannot be owning factories and also a member of the landed / leisure / wtf. The landed / leisure / wtf will take your money, tho, which is where this amazing sentence arises. HOWEVER, as near as I can tell, the motive for No Working! Comes from a super weird agrarian cosplay. Suggesting that the Pro Agrarian Crowd’s contempt for Industry is somehow a critique of capitalism that could be conceived of as Marxist is …. Soooooo odd.
OK, so, the chapter on capitalists has wrapped up. Honestly, it would have been a much better chapter if it had adopted an Obama-era tone of managed capitalism, vs. laissez-faire capitalism. Virtually all of the examples cited are examples in which the capitalist-hero’s behavior is at least somewhat mitigated / or found to not be as bad as it seemed initially, and so many of the marriages have explicit Rules of the Game embedded in them. Seems like a better, easier mapping, but whatever.
The next chapter is on soldiers, and I’m here initially to complain about inappropriate hyphenation. Not the author’s fault, and probably a fault of some sort of automated thing, but you really should not break Wynnegate Sahib as Wynneg-ate Sahib. That is Wrong.
Unlike the previous chapter, which had very aggressive interpretations of the hero embodying one class and the heroine two others, this chapter spends a lot of time saying that books with soldier-heroes are not … whatever.
“The established belief that capitalism is coterminous with democracy while communism is tyrannical is not scrutinized — the novel’s negation of one aspect of the ideology coexists with its affirmation of another.”
Honestly, there were some really amazing observations in the previous chapter about poor(er) heroines and rich(er) heroes, and that stock bit in which he lavishes wtf on her (mandatory sessions at the spa! Shopping for an entire wardrobe! Gem encrusted gowns!) begged for a lot more analysis. I would have _loved_ to see an analysis that went something like: rich men (capital class) elevate tokens from the working class to show that social mobility is a real thing and if you don’t pull it off yourself it must be something wrong with you … even tho there are never really enough Dukes or Billionaires for everyone to marry one.