Smooches and social media: what romance novels are telling us about technology and ourselves today
By understanding romance’s place in literature and society in academic terms, we can understand a bit more about our modern world.
As a university student who went to a library event on romance novels, university was the last thing on my mind. That was until an advertisement for a debut romance author surprised me by being an alumnus of my university. I found the footnote of the laudable institution next to the romantic summary paradoxical, until it reminded me how the University of Toronto graduate, Allan Lau, created the reading and publishing platform Wattpad with much of its successes arising from romantic fiction. These feelings, frivolity mixed with rigour, astronomical successes next to a genre that elicits eye-rolling, are what makes romance exist so liminally in literature.
After interviewing professors and the romance writer herself, I will delve into what is so attractive about the genre. Here is what creatives on campus might gain to learn about it at this university, besides the inspiration for the next hit campus sports romance, of course.
I interviewed the author, Vivian Jia Lac, who has her book coming out soon. Casually Yours will be published by Third State Books, an independent publisher focused on Asian American and Pacific Islander stories. Her writing process is informed by her Film Studies major, saying “I picture the scenes…and it’s the same way I watch a movie: how does this scene drive the plot forward?” Furthermore, a class on Chinese cinema particularly connected with her own depiction of emotions in her novels. Lac says, in screening films like In the Mood for Love (2000), “really nurtures how you tell a story, your love for storytelling.”
Lac’s novel plays with suspense of “will-they-won’t-they” from the synopsis; sexual chemistry sizzles between the characters, offset by their guarded feelings for one another. Only one thing’s certain: the characters do get together at the end. Do not take this for a spoiler though, for the romance genre and for Lac herself, “happily ever afters are non negotiable. People are pretty serious about ‘if this is a romance book? It needs to have a happily ever after.’”
In Sensational Designs: the cultural work of American fiction, 1790-1860, the author Jane Tompkins analyses of books outside the traditional canon derided for being too formulaic or melodramatic from theorists, reframing these novels and their literary value as cultural work. Cultural work becomes a “blueprint for survival under a specific set of political, economic, social, or religious conditions” (Tompkins, 1986, p. xvii). In a time of disconnection and hookup culture, contemporary romance novels are resonant with broader cultural trends and desires.
Chris Koenig-Woodyard (PhD), a professor from the Department of English & Drama, teaches ENG277: Bad Romance, a class centring on debates about the romance’s place in the canon and the public’s morality, discourse that the genre still grapples with. From Professor Koenig-Woodyard’s academic background, he considers the novel “historically…a technology.” Envisioning the novel as technological as HTML illuminates how both execute a vision of what the creator wants to see in the world, whether through a written language or a coding one.
His teaching is grounded in feminist pedagogy, allowing students to respond to the canon with their own emotions and artwork. His creative assignments have a creative portion and a critical part that ties back into what they have read. “Essentially, the students took over and proposed ways to be creative. It wasn’t my place to say no to that. UofT is so big. It is hard to feel connected, and this made them feel connected…I now have students who are publishing out of their early writing through those classes.” He does not credit himself solely for his past students’ achievements, instead attributing it to their perseverance in the publishing industry.
To form a picture of the readers’ perspective, I also spoke to Jess Rauchberg (PhD), a feminist media studies professor at Seton Hall University. Professor Rauchberg elaborates that beloved romance tropes are affordances. This term describes how this technology allows for the possibility of “the author to do one thing but allow[ing] the audience to do something else.” In many of these books, this can be seen in the push and pull relationships and character-focused subplots that leave readers ravenous for more.
Professor Koenig-Woodyard attributes some of these affordances to how the romance genre runs parallel to the tradition of the gothic, and plays with delay. While the stakes are sometimes more mundane, the foundation of suspense created by specific tropes are the same. In a world that seems unstable and fraught, a fairytale ending can be just the kind of media to cheer someone up. “The payoff, ultimately, feels so satisfying as a writer and a reader. In real life, you might not get that.” Lac admits.
Across all of the people I have consulted, the work of advertising your books, attending classes (both academic, and non-academic), or participating in writing conferences compounds with the complications of another technology: social media. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok with the respective tags #bookstagram and #booktok, promise an author instantaneous growth in the publishing industry. The reality of this technology though, looms over these romanticized fantasies of monetizing literary work like a villainous shadow.
For Professor Rauchberg, she cautions that avenues of creative expression in content creation only democratize for diverse voices for a select few. Social media is “very imperfect, especially for marginalized creators as platforms are rolling back protections.” Both professors note how people now more than ever are able to share their personal, authentic experiences through these technologies. Lac, for instance, mentioned that making her protagonists Asian-American was a given, influenced by her Vietnamese heritage.
When Gen Z is consuming stories about campus life and brainstorming on how to monetize their hobbies, we should strive not just to cynically pen our characters’ passions but write in pursuit of finding our own. Cultural work feels the most truthful–the words emerge as more free flowing–when it comes from the emotion that the romance genre holds in high esteem: love.
