As an undergraduate, I didn’t study romance fiction. My own reading experiences illustrate this process. The effects of the exclusion of popular romance fiction from the university curriculum are that students actively resist these texts and do not have the required skills to read and understand them. The cultural capital, or cultural competencies, that universities provide for students reflects this twofold role: universities confer qualifications that guarantee a student’s familiarity with legitimate culture and also foster long-lasting beliefs about literature over years of training in literary studies (“Forms” 87). Educational institutions promote particular attitudes towards reading and the “pursuit of culture” ( Field 233). The omission of popular romance fiction from the literary studies syllabus judges the legitimacy of romance, but it also has far-reaching consequences for the formation of students’ reading practices. As Pierre Bourdieu explains, educational institutions legitimise specific literary texts by cultivating familiarity with and appreciation of them ( Field 121). Teaching popular romance fiction in the university is a sharp reminder of the importance of the syllabus in shaping society-wide notions of literary value. She researches contemporary literary culture and is the author of The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). This account of teaching Roberts raises questions about the interaction between reading for entertainment and reading for university, and the ways in which an academic context affects readers’ appreciation of different kinds of writing.Ībout the Author: Beth Driscoll is a lecturer in the Publishing and Communications program at the University of Melbourne. In the final section, the article explicitly considers readers by reporting on a 2013 survey conducted by the author to gauge students’ reactions to studying Spellbound. It outlines the subject’s overarching pedagogical approach, including its objectives, syllabus and assessment, and presents a summary of the lecture on Roberts and her novella, Spellbound that engages with notions of genre, author and text.
Abstract: This article offers a reflection on the author’s experience of teaching a novella by Nora Roberts, Spellbound, to an undergraduate English subject Genre Fiction/Popular Fiction at the University of Melbourne.
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