[This past weekend I attended the one scholarly conference I never miss: the Northeast MLA. It was a great time as it always is, so as usual here’s a series of reflections on some of the great work I heard, saw, and shared there! Leading up to a few more reflections on NeMLA as an organization!]
On two
interesting throughlines I took away from a pair of provocative panels.
Before the
Saturday morning panel of my own about which I wrote in yesterday’s post, I had
the chance to attend a pair of interconnected sessions organized by literary
scholar Melodie
Roschman around the same topic: Guilty Pleasures: Sexy Stories, Female
Desire, and Resistance. A number of the talks understandably focused on aspects
of the Romance genre (and related subgenres like Paranormal Romance, Romantasy,
etc.), which is not a topic about which I know a great deal (although I did
write a Grad school paper analyzing audience expectations and experiences
through the lens of Janice Radway’s influential 1984 book Reading the Romance) and so I
was happy to learn more from these scholars of it and the particular authors
and works they discussed. But as with all of the NeMLA panels I’ve attended in
my multi-decade association with the conference and organization, I also found
ways to connect these conversations to my own work and ideas, and wanted to
mention two of those thought-provoking throughlines from these sessions here.
One debate
which came up in a number of the talks across both sessions, as you might
expect with this overarching topic, was whether it’s a good/productive or
bad/destructive thing to use literary/cultural works as escapism (or related
frames like enchantment). To be clear, none of the presenters bought into the longstanding
narratives that novels and other cultural works are themselves “bad,” not
for women and not overall; but there was a great deal of thoughtful analysis of
the potentially limiting but also potentially liberating effects of getting
lost in such works. In particular, the chair of the second session, Babson
College Professor
Samantha Wallace, provocatively used a J.R.R. Tolkien essay to
frame these questions in her talk on Romantasy novelist Sarah Maas and the
dangers and benefits of becoming enchanted by such books and their worlds. Which
was especially thought-provoking for this audience member as I’ve been having
very similar conversations throughout my current section of Introduction
to Science Fiction and Fantasy, beginning with our first reading,
Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring.
I always love when a NeMLA panel can inform my current semester and teaching,
and this was an excellent example of that effect.
I
frequently glean such lessons for my teaching at NeMLA, but I always learn a
great deal about American literature, culture, and history—there’s a reason why
I decided to serve a three-year term as the organization’s American
Area Director, after all. And in this case, it was an excellent paper from
the chair of my own panel (about which and whom I wrote yesterday), Vaughn
Joy, that offered the most fascinating lessons about American history and
culture. Vaughn’s paper discussed the
Hays Code, the multi-code policy (first created as a set of
recommendations, but shortly thereafter and for many years an enforced set of restrictions)
through which Hollywood authorities sought to control and censor film
productions. I had long seen reference to the Code as a part midcentury
Hollywood histories, but Vaughn went into significantly more detail about its
origins, evolutions, specific provisions, effects, and, most inspiringly, the manifold
acts of resistance through which artists and filmmakers (including none other
than Frank
Capra himself) challenged and eventually helped end the Code. I’ve never
attended a NeMLA conference without coming away thoroughly impressed by at
least one scholarly presentation, and this was the paper that did it for me in
2024.
Last
reflection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. If you
were at NeMLA, what would you share? If not or in any case, other organizations
you’d highlight?
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