The Lost Innocence of Love: Romance as a Postmodern Condition

This article examines the relationship between ‘mass media’ representations of love and a model of love which we commonly view as more ‘realistic’, that is more compatible with sharing everyday life with another. The article offers three arguments: (1) the postmodern claim that everyday life in general and romantic love in particular have been colonized by the empty ‘simulacrum’ of mass media resonates with a long-standing Western discussion of the problematic relation between fiction and reality; (2) the relation between mass media representations of love and realistic models of love is reconceptualized as deriving from two conflicting bodily experiences of love; (3) postmodern love is defined as being characterized by a particular crisis of representation in which signifiers and signifieds of love do not match.