Exploring difference
Paranormal novels let readers and writers explore real world differences through fantastic beings. Eric Selinger, DePaul University professor of English, on ways that paranormals let us pose difficult questions: What makes a good paranormal read? Is it species or societies at odds? Characters who live among humans, but are somehow different? Imagining having psychic or magical abilities? What plots, characters, [...]
Is it love?
Could you recognize love in another time or part of the world or even another subculture? DePaul University professor of English Eric Selinger ponders the wide variety of actions and thoughts encompassed within one word. How do you define love? What’s required for you to read or view or feel something and accept it as love? Do you have family [...]
Is love universal?
Love makes the world go ’round, but does it also go around the world? How do portrayals of love in various cultures allow us to explore our own? Eric Selinger, an English professor at DePaul University, speaks about his experiences as a scholar of popular romance. What international films, books, shows, or songs have changed how you think about love [...]
Think globally, love locally
At an international conference on popular romance fiction, a member of the logistical team that was hosting us took me aside to ask about the topic of the gathering. “Love?” he smiled, a little bemused. “You know, I came here from Iran—and no one knows more about love than the Persians.” As we chatted, he told me more, breaking periodically [...]
A romance novel as art?
Can a romance novel be a work of art? Baldly put, the question seems a little out of date. After all, it’s been almost a hundred years since Marcel Duchamp bought a snow shovel and inscribed it In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), the first of his famous “Readymades.” (His next big number is even more famous: in 1917, [...]
What’s it all about, Arnold?
My father, who loved to sing, had little taste for rock ‘n roll. It was the end of the 1960s, and modern show-tunes were his favorites—songs from The Fantasticks, Camelot, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris—along with the occasional foray into lush, top-40 pop. I can probably still sing you every word of that big brown [...]
Origins of IASPR
The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) was created to encourage scholars to study representations of romantic love in global popular culture—through the lenses of literature studies, social history, popular culture studies, business analysis, and anthropology. I recently asked the organization’s president, Sarah Frantz, and the editor of its journal, Eric Selinger, about the beginnings of the [...]
Play it again, Selena Gomez
For 25 years, now, more or less, I’ve been haunted by a pair of sentences about love by the French thinker Roland Barthes. “Anguish, wound, distress or jubilation,” he muses: “the body, from head to toe, overwhelmed, submerged by Nature, and all this nonetheless: as if I were borrowing a quotation. In the sentiment of love, in the erotic madness, [...]
