For the past two centuries, the romance genre has been a mainstay of both literary and mass market fiction. Reduced to its bare bones, the romance attends to the emergence of its female heroine from social and psychological trials into the fulfillment of companionate marriage and domesticity. Because it foregrounds female experience, the modern romance is often framed as a “women’s genre,” even though the romance is no less preoccupied with elaborating the complementary masculine identity of the woman’s romantic objects (those she rejects, as well as the one she accepts) – and even though, historically, the romance novel has attracted male and female readers in roughly equal proportions. In most feminist critical accounts, to be sure, romance reads as something like a narrative machine for the production of a normative (conventional) gender imaginary – in which romantic fulfillment through marriage appears not simply as women’s only option, but as the apex o!
f their desires. At the same time, as these accounts often explore, the difficulty of securing the relation to the romantic hero marks the psychic costs and fragility of this gendered fantasy. From its inception, however, the romance has been cross-pollinated (so to speak) with the paranormal, a thematics of vampirism, haunting, possession, and over-consumption. Indeed, many of these elements can be found in the paradigmatic fictions of the genre, those most dedicated, we might say, to the production of gendered social normality, even as the paranormal romance also constitutes a sort of fringe subgenre.

This course will take up the paranormal romance as a way to interrogate the cultural work of the modern romance genre. What is the relation between romance narratives and gender norms – between literary and social conventions? If genres operate according to certain narrative rules, or formula, what is it these rules guarantee – and, conversely, what practices of rule-breaking do they invite? How does the genre morph historically, in relation to changing gender norms, as well as changing conceptions of queer sexualities and interracial intimacy? How should we understand the status of the paranormal as simultaneously a central and a peripheral motif?

Reading for the class will likely include Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Edgar Allen Poe’s short fictions “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, and Charlaine Harris’s Dead Until Dark (on which the HBO television series Trueblood is loosely based). Required critical reading will include Jan Radway’s Reading the Romance, Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (vol 1), as well as essays by Inderpal Grewal, Joan Dayan, Angela Carter, and Judith Butler. Written work for the course will consist of numerous short assignments, and an option to choose between two shorter essays (5-6 pp), or one longer, final project (10-12 pp).