How people read different genres--whether it is within a religious tradition, as fans of a genre, or as film viewers--affects their life trajectories and the ways they view the world. The papers in this session consider a broad range of reading experiences which include how Black women learn romance rules by raiding their family members' book stashes, how travel books can help facilitate civil repair, how Jewish authors think about interstellar lives, and how apocalyptic films can help us think about the world we inhabit to inspire the audience to think about the complicated conundrums that literary engagement can help us traverse.
As recounted in the popular romance fiction community, many women readers and writers got their start in the genre as youth by stumbling upon an older female relative (mother, grandmother, sister)’s stash of romance novels, and surreptitiously secreting books away to read in private. The commonality and repetition of this act as a habit establishes it as a rich site for ethical analysis which directs us not simply to literary analysis at the level of narrative depiction, but to book historical considerations of circulation, material culture, and embodiment, among reader reception. In this paper, I argue that this romance reader rite of passage – stash theft – is a form of moral agency. I show how Black readers’ juvenile pilfering of their mother’s and grandmother’s stashes generationally communicates “womanish” ethical sensibilities through Black women’s strategies of dissemblance, hiddenness, and sociality, grounding a womanist virtue ethic for romance reading and embodying flourishing.
PBS television host and guidebook author Rick Steves is often lauded as the most trusted American voice in European tourism. While most scholarship configures travel through lenses of leisure, consumption, and even settler-colonialism, this paper examines Rick Steves’ five-decade-long career through the lens of religion. Drawing on work on secularism, religious nationalism, and popular culture, as well as ethnographic data of six Rick Steves tours and text analysis of his PBS show, guidebooks, and radio show, I argue that analyzing Steves’ project through the lens of religion affords an important hermeneutic perspective that illuminates how travel is a form of pilgrimage and moral formation—specifically, a project of civil repair. Steves’ progressive vision as a Lutheran philanthropist and Democratic activist, including his resistance to the Trump administration, affords us the chance to examine the consistencies and contradictions of travel as a project of civil repair, including cosmopolitan identity and overtourism.
First contact novels offer a perfect place for authors of science fiction to explore ethical dilemmas. In The Sparrow duology by Mary Doria Russell and A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys, alien cultures present as accepted fact ideas that humans may reject – that it is okay for one type of sentient being to eat another, and that it is necessary to abandon your planet of origin in order to live safely in space, respectively. The characters in these books struggle to respond ethically, and in each case main characters draw on Judaism to help them define and shape their reactions. The authors’ portrayal of Judaism differs, though: a centering of belief, text, and history in Russell’s texts versus a focus on social relationships, ethics, and narratives in Emrys’ novel. This change is consistent with changes in Americans’ understandings of how and why people are religious even in a “secular” society.
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic cinema attempt to hold two incongruous themes together: a depiction of the end in its brutal, often sensationalist, violence and the promise that this ending will be the opportunity for ‘us’ to become the best version of who ‘we’ always already were. Recent films have embraced a gritty realism in order to depict the near future that may emerge as the result of the intersecting crises of climate change, intensifying social divisions and growing political instability. I argue these explorations of the polycrisis harbour hidden hopes, but this poses a dilemma. This hope is directionless—it is a hope in hope itself. Taking 2073 (2024) as an example of this dilemma, I contrast polycrisis cinema with the cinema of the Cold War. I show that films from this earlier period were more willing to engage what Günther Anders calls a ‘naked apocalypse’.