Link Round Up: Women Readers, Digital Reading, and College Syllabi

imageHere’s some sad, sad Pac-Mans, to quote Stephanie Leary. VIDA posted their count of major publications, their reviewers by gender, and their reviews by gender of the author.

Oh, that is one hurtin’ Pac Man collection right there. The New York Times book review pages feature books by men twice as much as books by women, while The New Yorker features books by men four times as much as books by women. I knew it was bad but oh, holy night, that just dropped my jaw.

VIDA is ready to “invest our efforts and energy into the radical notion that women are writers, too.” I’m all for it, but I knew that – given that romance is mostly written by women, read and bought by women, and also mostly edited by women. And of course romance isn’t reviewed in major publications like The New Yorker or The New York Times—though there are bigger changes afoot. Publisher’s Weekly is now focusing on romance, led by Rose Fox, and I think other publications will have to follow their lead.

And there’s always the internet, where book readers review books in growing numbers – I love that there are so many of us now.

Secondly, I’m up at Kirkus this week, in a two-part article (code for ‘Damn, that was really long’) that examines The Good and the Bad of Reading Romance Digitally.

I’ve not had any problems immersing myself in the experience of reading an e-Ink screen. In fact, I find it more comfortable than reading a book. Why? One reason: text size. I’ve joked that I’m an ideal test subject for digital reading device developers, because I’m an avid reader in her mid-30s with the eyesight of a 95-year-old. With the e-Ink display, I can crank the text up to “Great-Grandma Size” and read without my glasses. It’s marvelous to be able to customize the display, the text size and even the number of lines per page, depending on the book file, to suit your preferences.

There are also a growing number of sources to access digital books. Most people think of the big ones, Amazon and Barnes & Noble at bn.com, but there are also small independent online retailers like AllRomanceBooks.com and publisher bookstores like Harlequin’s at ebooks.eHarlequin.com.
Then there’s your local library—did you know that many libraries offer digital lending? Go to Search.Overdrive.com and click “Find a library” to see if your nearest branch offers digital lending. It’s wonderful, and since libraries pay a good amount of their not-for-profit dollars to have that access, if it’s available, use it! 

This article, I believe, will also appear in the print edition of Kirkus as well. The “bad” of digital reading will be published online on 19 February.

And finally—a good friend of mine sent me this link to a Buzzfeed picture of a required text for an English course: Yup, That’s Twilight.

My first thought was to wonder at all the different things you could do with Twilight on a syllabus, and what parts of the book could be focused upon in a collegiate setting. With some google-fu, I found a librarian’s Tumblr, where “librariansoul”, a “gay, atheist, feminist male librarian” revealed that the book is for an Honors level Introduction to Fiction course at Ohio State University.

Librariansoul thinks the decision to have an honors level course look at Twilight, Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw and Dracula is a hot pile of crapidea, saying

Henry James was an excellent writer but Stephenie Meyer couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag and Bram Stoker, to be honest, wasn’t a whole lot better….

Courses where all four of these works should have been on the required reading list:
• Some sort of survey course that covers hundreds of books and fills all the weird gaps between them. Frankenstein is only supernatural literature in a kind of superficial sense; The Turn of the Screw is a fairly ambiguous ghost story; Dracula is a gothic horror novel; and Twilight is romantic bilge. They have very little in common, and yet I can’t see how they would be much good in a comparison/contrast sort of way, either.

In conclusion: Twilight wasn’t the only strange and inappropriate entry in Dr. Garcha’s list of required reading material; the whole thing should have been seriously reconsidered.

I am with him that those four novels have in common that “there be some paranormal/supernatural stuff in here, yo.” But I don’t necessarily think putting Twilight on a syllabus would be a bad idea, or make it the worst English course in history. I tend to think everything is worth examining, particularly things like Twilight that evoke such a response that people get the movie posters tattooed on their entire bodies. (Don’t make me post a link. Ok, fine, here **fixed the link – sorry about that **). I had a rather negative reaction to the book, but I also know plenty of people who adore it, and that response and the potential cause alone would be worth examining, in my opinion, particularly with the tools available to your nearest English student.

What do you think? Could you envision that book on a syllabus? What would you want to examine about it, if so?

Categorized:

The Link-O-Lator

Comments are Closed

  1. Niveau says:

    @AHLondon1:

    I was sure I was going to enjoy that link you posted, but the criticisms of feminism were just too much for me and I couldn’t get very far. It reads as a post about what you think modern feminism is, not about Twilight itself, which was not at all what I was expecting. It’s fine to criticize feminism as you think it currently exists, but linking to a post like that in a thread like this, and presenting it as being about Bella’s character, and not about your problems with feminism, just seems dishonest.

  2. SusannaG says:

    Well, I would be interested to see what the professor was doing with it.

    A colleague of my father’s, back in the 1970s, taught a “contemporary literature” class, with Jonathan Livingston Seagull one of the books assigned.

    The students all proclaimed they loved it.  He exclaimed what a genius Richard Bach was:  “How many pages is this book?  How many are pictures?  How much is actual text?  What did you spend on it?  This man is a genius, I tell you!”  Then the real discussion began.

    I myself have had a book assigned (in grad school) that the professor knew everyone reading it would hate, because he wanted to see how well we could eviscerate a book we thought was complete crap, and what kind of tools we would choose to use to do it.

  3. orangehands says:

    Also, and I think this is big, Twilight had a huge following among teen girls AND middle age women. Not that many YA books cross-over in the sense of gathering an adult fan base – separate from the teen fan base – of adults who don’t usually read YA. 

    read Freud before they’re allowed to claim that psychology is a science (my vote is that it’s a philosophy, based on the prejudices of a very troubled asshole)

    LOL. Hell yeah. He really was a disturbing man.

    Tracy: While I definitely didn’t like everything (or most things) about the books, they do have some good points to them. And have created a lot of discourse, which I like. Plus I still say the “birthing scene” in book 4 is right up there with Aliens in horror terms. *shudder*

  4. Isabel C. says:

    I tend to agree that it’s not a problem to have Twilight on the list. I don’t think much of the series, but I also remember two weeks of Puritan captivity narratives, and Pamela, which…there isn’t enough “ew” in the English language. (For people who didn’t get subjected to that one: It’s like the worst of the Old Skool romances, except without the saving grace of sex scenes, or a heroine who’s even vaguely spunky.)

    Sometimes books are valuable from a “here’s what the culture was like” perspective*; sometimes they can show how certain messages come across in fiction, or one angle from which people approach a subject. Even if they suck. Perhaps especially if they suck: Robin McKinley wrote somewhere that she was inspired to write The Blue Sword because she loathed The Sheik so much.

    Also, Twilight works really well as *horror*. Unintentionally so, granted, but even that can be worth studying.

    *I spent a lot of time being Angry Stompy Undergrad about how I didn’t *care* about social significance, and why didn’t they have courses on how stories worked *as stories*, oh my God, we HAVE a Gender Studies department ALREADY. But hey.

  5. Cerulean says:

    I am a psychology professor and I literally *just* finished having a discussion with my research lab (I study intimate partner violence) about how Bella & Edward’s relationship is very similar to a coercive control relationship. You know, constant surveillance (he watches her sleep at night, etc.), obsessive jealousy (hello!), etc. So I totally think it belongs in a college course – it’s what you do with it once it gets there that matters. BTW, my students were beyond shocked that I’d read all of them.

  6. Joy says:

    Fascinating discussion.  See how easily we fell into a discussion of these books and how passionately we feel about them.  A clever professor could pull some very interesting insights from the students, cause them to ponder how novels reflect the culture that they come from, make them wonder about the emotional value of a novel versus its literary value and why do people read, etc. etc.  I could see this being someone’s favorite course for the semester where they learned a lot more about literature and its power than they did in their Survey of English Literature: Beowulf to Dickens.  I’ve taken many many literature course and even a goodly number of popular culture classes and read some clunkers of “classics” which on greater life experiences I’ve thought about again and again—believe me Henry James does have a lot to say though you couldn’t have convinced me at the time.  Sometimes reading books for your classes can be dull, exciting, deadly boring, enlightening, mystifyingly dense, etc.  Its the analysis, insight into culture and the sometime glorious passage that you bring away from it that matters.

  7. Tracy says:

    orange: Too true.  The birthing scene was graphic considering the audience.  Didn’t particularly bother me as I read horror just as easily as I read romance, but I definitely see your point.

    Fascinating discussion.  See how easily we fell into a discussion of these books and how passionately we feel about them.  A clever professor could pull some very interesting insights from the students, cause them to ponder how novels reflect the culture that they come from, make them wonder about the emotional value of a novel versus its literary value and why do people read, etc. etc.  I could see this being someone’s favorite course for the semester where they learned a lot more about literature and its power than they did in their Survey of English Literature: Beowulf to Dickens.

    Exactly.  That was precisely the point I was making.  One could make the argument that a book has merit (for teaching) because it can arouse an emotional discourse.  I would have preferred reading popular fiction versus class lit any day!!

  8. Tracy says:

    Erp.  I meant “classic” lit.

  9. Diva says:

    I’m pro-Twilight-on-a-syllabus. Think how much fun that would be to teach? SO many people love it (I’m not one personally) and there’s a great deal about the heroine’s self-concept, her role in her family and society, and the choices she makes to subsume all else to her primary relationship. There are huge identity questions to discuss in that story.

    It may not be my favorite (I tried…couldnt’ finish book 1) but it struck a chord with a lot of readers.

  10. I did hear from someone who professed to knowing her personally, or at least having spoken to her personally that Stephanie Meyer had a hard time finding a publisher.  I could not read them.  My dean’s list daughter loved them.  My granddaughters that read nothing loved them.  I had quibbles with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy but could not put them down.  Sometimes it’s the style.  Sometimes it’s the story.  Could never get ten pages into James Michener and he had the greatest material. I think a course analyzing literary success would be fascinating. But I guess then we’d have to analyze taste.  An impossibility. 

    husband42:  don’t I wish

  11. orangehands says:

    Cerulean: Sounds like a great class to take.

    Tracy: I had an interesting discussion with someone about the juxtaposition between how childbirth vs parenting was portrayed in the series. The birth scene is like the nightmare, worst case scenario childbirth scene, but the children themselves are mostly self-raised, perfect beings (Bella, Renesmee, all the ones Carlisle turned) or raised by someone else (the werewolf mate cub kids who Jacob’s friends had imprinted and were grooming.)

  12. notsurewho says:

    @SB Sarah …Tree porn, yes, that may just work!

    @Isabel C I think, in regards to Pamela, I preferred it to Moll Flanders to be honest.

  13. Tracy says:

    orange: That would make for an interesting discussion in a class.  I would sign up for that!

    BTW: Love the “tree porn” comment.  I lol’d.  🙂

  14. Ducky says:

    While I haven’t read Twilight myself, I was always under the impression that a large portion of its appeal (or at least what made it “romantic” instead of creepy) was in knowing with absolute certainty that Edward and Bella are perfect soul mates. The angst (again as I understand it) is not about “am I in love” or “what do these feelings mean” but instead “oh no he’s a vampire how can our wonderful love survive that?” All the hard work in establishing a relationship (and characterization) is done by fiat and sense of smell (or imprinting on a baby).

    Out of control jealously and stalking are creepy in real life, but if you’re assured it’s only for the best of reasons (love), for many people that becomes incredibly romantic. Witness the incredibly misunderstood “Every Breath You Take,” or even the general alpha male pattern. He’s only doing it because he loves you.

    …Unless, of course, I am wrong. Like I said, haven’t read them, but can’t blame those who have.

  15. Emily says:

    I am disappointed that the Twilight feature of this posting dominated the discussion. I found the pie charts more startling, and I wish more comments had been about them. I think this post had a lot of meat to it and would have been better broken up into several different post.
    this being said every school I went movies when “pressed for time”. At least they are reading Twilight, and not showing the movie. Although I am sure my old middle school is during the holidays.

  16. Emily says:

    sorry;  I meant to type: I am sure my old middle school is showing Twilight during the holdiay.

  17. notsurewho says:

    @ Emily
    The pie charts are rather disappointing..
    (Though I withhold further comment as I am neither a reader of those
    journals / magazines nor do I [-have time at the moment to-] take notice of general fiction… )

    They, the pie charts, have reminded me about the Broaduniverse statistic page which, as a speculative genre reader, I found fascinating.
    They are not up to date and deal only in a limited genre range/ restricted magazine selection but, I think, they are an interesting example of similar trends to what VIDA’s pie charts exposed.
    -An unsurprising gender imbalance where the male writer and reviewer is given more ‘authority’ than the female. –

    As a separate topic can I just say … I rather miss Romanticsf.com. Their forthcoming book section introduced me to quite a few new authors back in the day.

    Sticking my oar in solely because I have an assignment to write up and this is an interesting form of procrastination.

  18. Lindsay says:

    I can totally see how Twilight could be relevant to a literature course, but at the same time, I’m not sure I could stomach reading it, no matter. Maybe I could have as an undergrad; I think I had a lot more patience for reading for analysis then.

    On an almost unrelated note, I can’t even think about Dracula anymore, without thinking of this video.

  19. Kelly Bishop says:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/04/research-male-writers-dominate-books-world

    The Guardian has some really CHARMING quotes from the editor of the Times Literary Supplement about the Vida Statistics:

    “And while women are heavy readers, we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS.”

    “The TLS is only interested in getting the best reviews of the most important books,” Stothard continued.

    Makes me want to smack him upside the head.  Grrrr…

  20. Jean Lamb says:

    Personally, I enjoy the bloodsport potential of a bunch of feminist English majors tearing apart both _Twilight_ and _Dracula_; (note what happens to Lucy Westenra, she of the ‘why can’t I just marry all four of them?’ longings). Mina and Bella are sisters under the skin, and it would be good clean fun to make this clear to people. Ok, I like to kill orcs on Final Fantasy Xi, too, so I have certain issues with aggression that I generally quite enjoy

    .

    Ahem. Admittedly, I would also love to be part of a general deconstruction of the Harry Potter books as well. Mmm….tastes like phoenix!

    As for the greater authority automatically given to male writers, critics, and bloggers, this is news? Hathor’s Legacy has _plenty_ to say on that subject.

  21. AHLondon says:

    Substantive comments first:
    @Hydecat and kkw.  Spot on about Henry James.  Adding @Kelly Bishop: That reminds me of Tom Wolfe’s essay My Three Stooges in which he takes Updike, Irving, and Mailer for writing well but about nothing anyone cares about.  The stooges had cast Wolfe out of literature because his novels were popular, mega hits.  My favorite bit was a comment about Irving’s A Son of the CIrcus, set in India, but with a preface in which Irving admits that he knows next to nothing about India and didn’t bother to find out.  What does great prose matter if nobody wants to read it? 
    This also reminds me of one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips (and I do love the irony of thoughtful issues discussed by a 6 year old boy and a stuffed animal in a comic strip):
    http://marcel-oehler.marcellosendos.ch/comics/ch/1993/07/19930720.gif 
    This one is funny too:
    http://marcel-oehler.marcellosendos.ch/comics/ch/1990/11/19901102.gif

    For others that were interested in the relation between literature and popularity, The Teaching Company has a great course: Great American Bestsellers, Prof. Peter Conn.  They have frequent sales though regular price is a bit high.  It is a great course, though.

  22. AHLondon says:

    @Niveau, regarding my honesty, if you notice my post was directed to Chelsea who had recently posted that she had a friend who is “writting her thesis on feminest and anti-feminest themes in modern popular fiction”.  I could have cut and pasted my post and waylaid this thread, but as you noticed, my post is not on point for this thread.  That is why merely I provided the link for Chelsea’s friend. 

    The comment that I did not have the typical feminist take on Bella, was, in part, my way of giving anyone interested a heads up that I do not have “approved” opinions.  While my post focuses on how pop culture feminist critiques highlight the significant shortcomings of feminism, I do discuss Bella (and Buffy).
    I will not hide that I think feminism is only concerned with the plight of upper-middle class, professional, mostly white, women who make approved life choices.  Bella does not fit this bill.  Feminists simply ignore any facts that suggest she is not weak, or since the facts are sometimes things they wouldn’t do—anything domestic, like play parent to an immature mother—they just chuck those in with the ‘she’s a wimp’ evidence.  I will head over to Reasoning with Vampires sometime to make those arguments.  Furthermore, the post is long and as you did not read it all, you didn’t know that, toward the end, I discuss of Bella and Buffy, and Twilight, notably the provocativeness of sexual restraint and Meyer’s religion.

  23. AHLondon says:

    This Vanity Fair article isn’t precisely about male and female writers, but about the snob factor in books.  The author laments the use of e-readers because then he can’t tell if fellow train riders are reading acclaimed, acceptable books or dumb romances. 
    http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/08/wolcott200908

  24. Kirsten says:

    Here’s what the prof wrote of the concepts behind his syllabus. I know this is long, but it’s kind of lost in the syllabus.

    In this course, we will identify some of literary fiction’s defining characteristics, including its uses of narrative voices to tell stories, its manipulation of time to depict its subjects, and its emphasis on characters’ familial, sociopolitical, and erotic relationships… We will also explore how these texts, like much other fiction, try to create particular reading experiences, as they push us to consider the nature and importance of literary imagination and the way fiction’s seductiveness is tied to other potentially dangerous attractions.  We will… consider the relationship between fiction and other imaginative forms, including poetry, television, and film, and fiction’s transformation from (around 1800) a low and somewhat marginal literary form to (today) our culture’s dominant literary mode.

    It’s not supposed to be about whether the books are good or bad. It’s supposed to give students an opportunity to do critical analysis on culturally influential fiction. The first thing he mentions is narrative voice. Well, all of these books are told in the first person. Dracula is epistolary, the governess in Turn of the Screw is an unreliable narrator, etc. In Twilight, I found Bella to be an annoying narrator and that shaped my perception of the book- obviously other people feel much differently about it, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to include it in a discussion of narrative voice.  The family and romantic relationships of the characters also have a major influence on all of these books. Could Bella get away with everything she does if her parents weren’t divorced? There are a lot of people who see dangerous antifeminist themes in Twilight, which are seductive to both teens and adult women. And all of these stories have influenced popular culture, with multiple interpretations in various media. Obviously Turn of the Screw still has some influence as Jennifer Crusie just wrote a novel that was in part a response to the story, and Frankenstein, Dracula, and Twilight have all been the subject and inspiration of movies, other books, and other media.

    So, this course is not supposed to be a survey introduction to the literary canon. It is supposed to create an engaging environment that will give the students opportunities to examine particular works of fiction analytically. Given the debate on Twilight in particular here on this blog, I’d say it will
    succeed in that.

    At any rate, I’d rather examine these texts than the ones forced on me in my high school honors English class- Jude the Obscure, Billy Budd, Great Expectations and 1984. Guaranteed that I would never read Thomas Hardy or Herman Melville ever again, and if I hadn’t read a good chunk of Dickens already, would have guaranteed I’d never read anything else by Dickens, either (which would be a shame). It’s not like this is required coursework for the entire school- it’s a topical class for honors students- they can wait for the next offering if they don’t like this one.

  25. AHLondon says:

    @Niveau, I’d email this direct to you, but your profile doesn’t have a link that I can tell.  I just checked my post and I didn’t get a comment from you, just this comment over here accusing me of dishonesty. You state that you can’t take my criticisms of feminism, I’d love to hear why.  I’d welcome a discussion.

  26. Rose says:

    I just came across this, I’m taking a class right now where Twilight is required reading.  It’s not the class mentioned here, but it’s fantastic. We’re discussing the role of women within Vampire Narratives, using Twilight, True Blood, Dracula, and some others.  Twilight may not be great literature, but it’s produced some amazing discussions.

Comments are closed.

By posting a comment, you consent to have your personally identifiable information collected and used in accordance with our privacy policy.

↑ Back to Top