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

The average rating for A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-08-03 00:00:00 Russell Adams ok i am adding this to my "to read for free in Borders but burn out your eyes right after" list because while reading about my beloved Joanie of Mad Men on www.nymag.com i happen to wander over to the New York Times book review section. gads. Katie Roiphe - who postulated that women are partially responsible for their own rapes-- REVIEWS A Vindication of LOVE. Whew! great pairing of author and reviewer- like Coors Light and Dometic Violence!! A "Vindication" is a book that seeks to bring back the messy, sometimes, impossible loves of the past centuries that have fallen out of fashion (so says Katie) with our strange 20th-century urge for such un-romantic things as...ugh...equity? Safety? Realtionships that are not capitalist exchanges of female bodies passed between men like cattle? I am so Out.Of.Fashion. God, I am ao glad some uber-hot blond gal is asking us to consider the value of tormented, messy, sure-to-end relationships while posing demurely in the doorway of what my suddenly-too-tight-pants are hoping is an expensive hotel in Berlin or someplace old world and naughty. i am so glad because between these amazing new/old/recycled Rimbaud-ideas and her looks she may have just created herself as a brand of feminism that I haven't seen lately and everyone knows, i LOVE brand creation and i LOVE feminism so this one is right up my alley: Bombshell Suggests the Exact opposite of Current Thinking in Order To Create Controvery and Launch Career. Oh wait...i HAVE seen this before... Ann Coulter? No wait...it turned out she didn't know how to reason after all--let me see...i think-- wait--wasn't that exactly Katie Roiphe's approach as well??? Oh...i think we see some padding of the reviews for this book here. what ever happened to peer review? well, here it comes. i am reading this precisely because i think maybe someone with some actual feminist consciousness ought too. Nothing personal Katie, i'm sure your fifteen minutes of feminism made you more-than qualified to be the last word and authority on this book but that is precisely what concerns me.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-11-27 00:00:00 James Farrell 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.