Sontag’s description of Camp as a sensibility for artifice and exaggeration, used as a private code that becomes an identity is an accurate way to describe the extravagant tropes, visual signifiers, and archetypes found in the romance genre and understood and appreciated by the romance-reading community.
Honestly? Brilliant analysis 😄 The best Romances are self-aware and revel in going pedal-to-the-metal on tropes. And she’s right about Romance having a sensibility that’s different than “chick lit” or literary “romances” (that don’t follow the genre’s conventions).
“The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious [and create] a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”
— Susan Sontag
“Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste’‘ that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste… [and this] can be very liberating.
Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciations — not judgement. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy.”
— Susan Sontag
I keep seeing references to that Susan Sontag essay… I should get around to reading that sometime 😉
See also: Taste
