Language and Narrative Discourse
Radway also analyzes the romance genre, yet instead of listing her own preferences or specific works, she examines the genre by examining the language of the romance novel and how that language affects the readers. The style, Radway points out, is relatively simplistic. She describes it as “The contemporary romance’s prose is dominated by cliché, simple vocabulary, standard syntax, and the most common techniques associated with the nineteenth-century realist novel.” While these methods allow romance novels to be easily read, it is not just a sacrifice of artistic ability. The successful, fulfilling romance novel exists when the author herself has provided meaning for her story through the words she has written. Radway explains this further with this excerpt:
Reading is not a self-conscious, productive process in which they collaborate with the author, but an act of discovery during which they glean from her information about people, places, and events not themselves in the book. The women assume that the information about these events was placed in the book by the author when she selected certain words in favor of others. Because they believe words are themselves already meaningful before they read, Dot and her friends accept without question the accuracy of all statements about a character’s personality or the implications of an event.
— Janice Radway, Reading the Romance
This sort of interpretation keeps romance novel readers from having to guess the interpretation of a text. They link signifiers with signifieds not by historical significance and that specific word choice, but to meanings that resonate personally with them. Radway elaborates on this idea by stating “ rely on standard cultural codes correlating signifiers and signifieds that they accept as definitive. It has simply never occurred to them that those codes might be historically or culturally relative.” This type of criticism, unlike the New Critics, is focused solely on readers’ interpretation and the ability of the author to write in such a way that their words will resonate with each one personally. Therefore, the use of clichés, uncomplicated syntax, and signifiers which utilize familiar cultural elements assists the Romance genre.
Yet while there seems to be a lack of quality, this structure is not comprised due to laziness. The romance genre is precisely that: a genre, and one that serves not as an artistic tool but one that, for a little while, assures its readers of their own self-worth and ability to affect a patriarchic world, so by the end of the novel the female readers, often mothers, feel invigorated and ready to take on the day-to-day tasks of managing the home and family. However, Radway asserts that it is the individual woman’s choice to read romance novels, and that this selection not only fabricates a predictable, happy ending but depicts a heroine who discovers her own individuality through her ability to care for others, as opposed to unique personal qualities.
Read more about this topic: Reading The Romance
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