A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century Book

Nehring is not writing in a prescriptive way. She does, however, make the mistake of assuming her audience is entirely boring & sexless & etc. I think more of us understand the value of transgression than she allows. Still, she's arguing against a conservative retrograde culture, and that's valid.

There's a lot that's great here: I love the way she allows her erotic (and maternal) life to enter her critical writing. I love the space she allows for inconsistency in the feminist-subjective identity. I love her take on Mary Wollstonecraft, who was as passionate in love as she was in her politics (a non-marriage and multiple suicide attempts), or Emily Dickinson's abject "My Master" letters. I love her takedown of Coetze and specific vindication of Katha Pollitt ("Pollitt never comes close to stating men are rats. What she stated was rather: Men matter. Men matter to women intellectuals.") I love being reminded of Carolyn Heilburn's Writing a Woman's Life which I read in college, which argues that female biographies are written as LOVE narratives while male biographies are written as QUEST narratives. (This recalls Virginia Woolf's Ms LaTrobe, both a romantic vision and an epic quest narrative. I love that Woolf did that in BETWEEN THE ACTS, which was left unfinished at her death. A novel about the theater, about a woman of the theater.) And I love that Nehring takes it further, linking the Quest to the Love, arguing that Love is always a Quest, for a man or a woman.

Perhaps the greatest point of her book is to argue for the power of abjection, that the abject lover is ultimately a hero & that the position is transformative and transcendent. In this way her text is not unlike Chris Kraus' I LOVE DICK, except that Nehring reads loving Dick as a transcendent act. Which it is, bien sûr.