Clarification:

Rather, she might be interesting in commenting on the hoopla rather than joining it herself.

To be honest, I don’t think that it is in Stephenie’s best interest to comment on this discussion. Yes, she has done interviews on her work. But we’re talking about a depth of criticism that an author shouldn’t have to engage in.

There’s no way she’s going to confirm anything (Yes! I am obsessed with mountain meadows. Yes! I listened to Saturday’s Warrior incessantly while writing the books) so at the very best she set herself to being accused of being naive at the worst disingenuous or dissembling in order to protect her enterprise.

In my experience, critics who push things this far don’t care about authorial intention anyway.

William — do your old connections still stand? Can you arrange a reinterview? I think Meyer deserves the opportunity to comment on the burgeoning criticism of her work. I don’t know that she wants it, but if she did, we’ve been friendly before.

Which is why I think we need more conversations like this.

Yet, just because this erotic aspect is present, doesn’t mean Meyer fully intended her books as emotional porn. I’m positive that she was working within and against her understanding of teenage sexuality as she wrote, but don’t know that she meant for the text to be as emotionally titillating as it is.

By Meyer’s own account, she was writing from a dream she had and, I would argue, that it is a very immature, naive, and uneducated approach to sexuality, informed by church culture and the absence of real information or first-hand knowledge of some of the more nuanced layers of human (and female) sexuality.

I would submit that Meyer had no idea what she was writing and that it was, in great part, stream-of-consciousness.

Yes, Tyler. :D

Come back soon.

As for your comment that marketing and timing have everything to do with the series’ success, I completely agree. Meyer and her publisher hit it big by peddling the book online (in part) and by establishing an official and persistent presence on the web.

I also believe, as much as you decry the notion, that the books’ sensuality has much to do with their success. And, as MoJo points out, I think soft porn’s a bit too much for Twilight. Emotional porn seems more fitting, especially as this term carries the implication, discussed elsewhere, that the books embody an “erotics of abstinence”–a muted sexual interplay between Edward and Bella in which Bella’s hormones and Edward’s bloodlust repeatedly interact and their bodies ache to possess one another, often actively to the point of arousal, though never beyond sexual climax until after their marriage in Breaking Dawn.

Yet, just because this erotic aspect is present, doesn’t mean Meyer fully intended her books as emotional porn. I’m positive that she was working within and against her understanding of teenage sexuality as she wrote, but don’t know that she meant for the text to be as emotionally titillating as it is.

Now to tackle your comment that we should be “seeking after things that make us better, not things that help us escape reality”: Because I know that you’ve been in school for a while and that you thoroughly enjoyed Rowling’s Potter series, I have to wonder if you read them solely as a way to make yourself a better person or if there was some part of you that read them because you wanted to relieve yourself of the pressing demands of your reality—because you wanted to “escape” into or journey through that world with Harry and friends. However, such an escapist approach to literature (which exists, in my mind, on the opposite end of the spectrum of escapism, far from drug use as a means to get away from reality) doesn’t necessarily negate the pursuit of knowledge and character you allude to. As Orson Scott Card observes in a lecture given at the Harold B. Lee Library on March 13, 1980 as part of the Sesquecentennial Lectures on Mormon Arts, Letters, and Sciences (available online here–I recommend it; Card makes some interesting points that are relevant to our interactions with literature as Latter-day Saints),

Fiction is not an escape from reality. Fiction is simply another kind of reality, one which takes place within finite borders, between endpapers. Unlike life, it begins and ends; we can close the book and draw conclusions. It is often easier to learn from fiction than from life; but fiction is a necessity to so many of us because through it we live many lives, and learn many things, instead of staying in the much safer reality and learning only a few things.

And so, while I see where you’re coming from, like Card, I don’t see literature and reality as mutually exclusive enterprises. Rather, each ties into the other in ways that can give us experience with life, the universe, and everything else (including sexuality, evil, and sin) such as we can’t experience it all elsewhere (not that I’m saying we can get our porn on and call it gaining experience: literature and pornography are, to me, completely different avenues of “expression” [if we can even call porn that]). And this compression of life experience can ultimately work to make us more like God, which is what I think you’re really trying to get at here.