Wednesday, April 09, 2014

PCA/ACA 2014 - The romance menu


Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference: 16-19 April

Where available I've included links to the abstracts of the papers, a brief quote from each, and links to further details about each of the presenters.

Romance I: Sex, Death and Reading Minds
Romance II: Love and God; Life and Art
Romance III: A Conversation with Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Romance IV: Modern Love/Love and Modernism
Romance V: From Print to Digital
Romance VI: The Reader and Her Romance
Romance VII: Reading the Romance Turns Thirty (1): a Roundtable Discussion with Janice Radway

Romance VIII: Reading the Romance Turns Thirty (2): a Roundtable Discussion with Janice Radway

Romance IX: Histories, Geographies
Romance Session X: Romancing the Other
Romance XI: Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy
Romance XII: Lesbian and M/M Romance
Romance XIII: Reading the Romance Turns Thirty (3): the Impact of RTR on Popular Romance Novels, Novelists, and Scholarship and Open Forum

A roundtable on the influence on Janice Radway’s Reading The Romance on the romance genre, its novels, novelists and scholars. Also the Romance Area’s annual Open Forum in which we discuss the on-going development of the field of Popular Romance Studies.

Romance XIV: Mid-Century Romance: Teens, Gothic and Adventure
Romance XV: New Romantic Configurations

Other papers of interest include:

Sex, Love, Romance and... Academic Writing?: Relationships in Popular Culture as a Springboard for an Extended Academic Research Project ["This presentation will describe a classroom-tested sequence of writing assignments that leads undergraduates (sophomores-seniors) to compose 15-25 page academic papers on sex, love, and romance in the mass media"] - by Gwen Hart, Buena Vista University

Passionate Virtue: conceptions of professionalism in the medical romance ["these texts, which strive for 'realism' on their own terms, negotiate contemporary threats to nostalgic professionalism, such as commercialism, consumerism, and third party usurpation of physician autonomy"] - by Jessica Miller, University of Maine

Relearning Modern Day Vampire Mythology through Popular Paranormal Romance Novels ["discussing some of the current adult vampire paranormal romance series that modify our traditional notions about vampires"] - by Jessica Haggerty, Western Governors University

Reading Our Lives: the Cultural Work of Contemporary Women's Book Clubs ["Using the survey Janice Radway developed for the study which culminated in her groundbreaking work Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, I designed a lengthy reader survey that I distributed to [...] eleven women's book clubs"] - by Liana Odrcic, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The Princess Bride: A Myth for Modern Times ["True love is transformational.  True love kills us and resurrects us.  The lovers in this film individually and together must go through their own symbolic deaths and resurrections"] - by Jan Peppler, Pacifica Graduate Institute

Fifty Shades of Hope: Finding Healing Erotic Power in a Cultural Phenomenon ["The cultural phenomenon created by the Fifty Shades books as well as the books’ narrative will be explored as evidence of a cultural move towards embracing erotic power as well an illustration of how relationships can be transformed by erotic mutuality"] - by Julie Clawson, independent scholar

1 comment:

  1. Wow, that's a lot of papers. Thanks for putting this together. I'll need to find a way to clone myself to get to all of them. I'm very excited. What a great romance area Eric and An have put together.

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