HHF

Read two articles: “Defeating the Critics: What We Can Do About the Anti-Romance Bias” and “ ‘I’m a Feminist, But…’ Popular Romance in the Women’s Literature Classroom” to finish homework 1 and 2.

Link for “Defeating the Critics: What We Can Do About the Anti-Romance Bias”: http://jennycrusie.com/non-fiction/essays/defeating-the-critics-what-we-can-do-about-the-anti-romance-bias/

Article “‘I’m a Feminist, But…’ Popular Romance in the Women’s Literature Classroom” is PDF that I send to you.

Homework 1

Look at Crusie's article, "Defeating the Critics;" specifically, the introduction and her first point that "romance fiction says that women are primary not supporting characters, equal to men in power, intelligence, and ability" (Crusie). We are going to do a little bit of creative thinking to apply some of what she talks about.

After you read the article in its entirety and review the beginning and first point, imagine you are an English literature professor teaching a "Popular 20th Century American Literature" class. One day in class, a female student asks your opinion of romance novels.

Your post for this forum will be your response to her, based on the following fact: you don't like romance novels, and have made a conscious choice not to teach them.

I leave the reasons why you, as your professor "character," doesn't teach popular romance novels up to you. In your post, make sure you convey the reasons why the professor don't teach them, and his/her general opinions of them.

You can write just the response, or what your "character" would say with an explanation as to why s/he would make this response, if it isn't apparent from the response itself. It may be fun and helpful to think a little bit about what kind of person your character is -- what is his/her background? What does s/he do for fun? What does s/he read? What kind of teacher is s/he? You can talk about these points explicitly or you can let your response convey who your character is.

The simple form my classmate:

“Today one of my student asked me: "why won't you talk about romance novels since we are talking about Popular 20th Century American Literature? it is such a large and popular genre!"

"Yes it is, but it is also such a controversial genre. Mostly because the majority of them are what I would call "friction". Most romance novels are trying to carry too much things beyond them, which made them untrue. Besides that, everyone has there own definition of love, it is such a personal issue, and romance novel are just one person's perspective that is too narrow a for such a big topic to define. Just because romance novel is such a huge genre, if I choose to talk one novels or only a few, we will have some people disagree with them and complain about there are other works that are different, but if we spend more time talk about the genre, then there is too much issue will be brought up. So due the complexity and controversy of this genre, I would not bring this genre into our topic. Plus, so far there is not a settled 'common law' for romance novels, they vary too much and I have not found one that is 'golden' for every criteria therefore I will not teach you all such a vague genre." ”

Homework 2

Where do Crusie’s “Defeating the Critics” and Duggar’s “’I’m a feminist, but…’” articles intersect? What claims do they make that are similar? Do they prove these claims in the same kinds of ways, or differently? Explain.

On the other hand, what is a point that Crusie and Duggar differ on? How do they differ?

Because of the similar claims made by both articles, it may seem that the articles would be interchangeable from a research standpoint. However, they’re not. Explain?