Spent the day thinking in titles:
- Ishq, Actually? Popular Culture at the Crossroads of Sacred and Secular Love
- Dead Women are Not Romantic:“Popular Romance” Reads “Literature”
- Hot Poems and Literary Curries: “Popular Romance” Reads “Literature"
- Hot Poems and Curries of Convention: “Popular Romance” Reads “Literature”
- Feeding a Fine, Stout, Healthy Love:When Poetry Meets Popular Romance
- The Arts of Love:Lyric, Ekphrasis, and Popular Romance
- Some Strange Music Draws Me In:When Lyric Love meets Popular Romance
- Shapely Stories, Shards of Love:When Lyric Poetry Meets Popular Romance
- Starved by Sonnets, Fed by Song:When Lyric Poetry meets Popular Romance
- Extravagance and Convention:Love Poetry and Popular Romance
- O Golden-Tongued Romance!Some Encounters of Lyric and Companionate Love
- When Lyric Love Meets Companionate Marriage:On Poetry and Popular Romance
So, nu? Thoughts?
4 comments:
I don't understand the curry allusion, unless that's supposed to be a reference to Bollywood?
They're all clever titles, and they make me want to read the paper(s) but would it be very cruel to suggest that you leave the clever title-making alone for a while and decide which essay/paper you want to write first? I think it would be easier to be sure which title is best after you've finished writing the paper/essay.
Not cruel at all, Laura--just an embarrassing glimpse into my compositional process, where clever titles sometimes come first, as a sort of shorthand for ideas and approaches.
The curry allusion wasn't to Bollywood, but rather to a line from Jessica in Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels:
“In my dictionary, romance is not maudlin, treacly sentiment,” she said. “It is a curry, spiced with excitement and humor and a healthy dollop of cynicism.” She lowered her lashes. “I think you will eventually make a fine curry, Dain—with a few minor seasoning adjustments.”
For example, this morning I thought of a new twist on one of the ones on the list: "Dead Women are Not Romantic; or, Emma Bovary's Revenge."
That's shorthand, to me, for a version of the "engagement with literary tradition" idea that foregrounds the engagement with modernism, which Andreas Huyssen once called “an aesthetic based on the uncompromising repudiation of what Emma Bovary loved to read.”
As a reader, I'd like a title that tells me what you mean by popular romance. I think I know, but I'm not sure. I'd like a concise title that tells me what the paper is about and doesn't require too much interpretation.
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