Tania Modleski (born 1949) is an American feminist scholar and cultural critic, Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance, "to begin a feminist analysis of women's reading", considered three popular fictional genres: the Harlequin romance, the Gothic novel and the daytime US soap opera. Modleski argued that the formulaic nature of these genres gave readers the freedom to construct their own response, at a distance from the text. Her next book, The Women Who Knew Too Much, examined seven Hitchcock films: Blackmail, Murder, Rebecca, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo and Frenzy. Modelski now challenged the terms of taking 'distance' from a text, arguing that "the desire for distance itself [is] ... bound up with the male's insistence on hi