Writing With a Vengeance: The Legacies of Tania Modleski’s Loving With a Vengeance & The Women Who Knew Too Much

Thursday, February 21, 2013. 3:15 pm- 4:15 pm @ THH 420

Few scholars manage to trouble the critical currents in their own field of study and in far-flung disciplines as well. Yet beginning in 1982, with the publication of her brilliant Loving With a Vengeance, Tania Modleski upended many of the working assumptions of feminist film criticism, and in ways that reverberated among the disciplines of Literary Studies, Sociology, History, Gender Studies, American Studies, Communication, and Media Studies. Analyzing cultural texts at the very bottom of our cultural escalator–Harlequin romances, TV soaps, and gothic novels–Modleski explored reasons for their massive and longstanding popularity among women, and did so without recourse to the then-popular notion of false consciousness. In her 1988 book, The Women Who Knew Too Much, a revisionist study of the work of director Alfred Hitchcock, Modleski challenged prevailing views, both pro and con, about the director’s work and complicated feminist understandings of female spectatorship.

In order to mark two anniversaries–the 30th anniversary of the publication of Loving With a Vengeance and the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Women Who Knew Too Much–the University of Southern California’s Center for Feminist Research, Gender Studies Program and English Department will sponsor “Writing With a Vengeance,” a symposium that will both celebrate and critically appraise the legacies of Modleski’s two landmark texts. “Writing With a Vengeance” features Lynn Spigel, who holds the Frances Willard Professorship of Screen Cultures at Northwestern University; Victoria Johnson, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine; Kara Keeling, Associate Professor of Critical Studies and American Studies at USC; and, our honored colleague, Tania Modleski, the Florence R. Scott Professor of English at USC.

RSVP to gender@usc.edu