A postmodern defense of Romance

Here's a grad student's musings on Hawthorne and Romance (in the fairy-ish sense, not the love sense). It's somewhat misty, to me--probably because it was written by a grad student, who has been writing too many misty papers--but he wants to bring Romance back as a viable and acceptable genre, as opposed to its current despised status.

But he seems to like Hawthorne and Romance in a postmodern way. Look at this.

The 'truth' of Hawthorne's Romances is dissimulation, and their effect is not a reassurance of recognition, or one's direct and holy spiritual continuity with the world, but the spectral rupture, the experience of unreality. The[y] begin their affective work in the way of all manner of thing which can bear a terrible
effectivity being neither living nor dead. This is to say, that at moments,
Hawthorne's more ghostly moments evoke/conjure the figure of the Derridean
ghost, or that ability to produce effects without having being. The airiness in Hawthorne is not a Platonic or symbolist kind of 'more real' reality in pneumatic things, but rather a gray pale fading away of Being.

He likes Hawthorne's romances because they illustrate the erosion of being itself. In saying, "Romance considers the possibility of affecting the reader's experience of reality rather than representing it," he is being profoundly postmodern: representation fails when reality fades, and power ("affecting the reader's experience") is all you are left with.

Personally, I want to bring back Romance as a genre because of its power to express a "more real" Reality; but Reality falls apart unless you have the Lord Jesus, the Logos, at the center. In Him all things hold together, and in Him we have our being. And, if we have Reality, we can then gain back reality as well, and representation with it.