Are You Taking Chic Lit Seriously, Yet?

Maybe you should be. Two distinguished universities are. Last fall, both Harvard and the University of Texas in Austin taught courses in which “Chic Lit” was a vital component. Here are excerpts from their catalogues:

WGS 1122. The Romance: From Jane Austen to Chick Lit (Harvard)
A critical investigation of the genre’s enduring popularity, beginning with Austen’s satirical Northanger Abbey and three novels credited with providing narrative templates for contemporary romances (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights). We then read twentieth-century revisions of these works (Rebecca, The Wide Sargasso Sea, Bridget Jones’s Diary). Topics: the female writer and reader/consumer of literature; moral warnings against romance, “sensation,” and titillation; the commodification of desire; Harlequins; the relationship between high culture and low.

RHE 309K - Title Topics in Writing-W [Topic Chick Rhetoric] (University of Texas in Austin)
Everybody knows what a chick flick is– it’s a sappy love story in which everyone cries-and real men don’t watch them. Yet the sappy and tragic Titanic was the largest grossing film ever, and not because only women saw it. The term Chick Lit didn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 2002, but it can be argued that Jane Austen was writing the stuff back in the 19th Century, long before Bridget Jones appeared on the scene. Linguists like Deborah Tannen and Robin Lakoff have argued that there is a women’s language, and it has long been argued that there are “women’s ways of knowing”–chick rhetoric and chick knowledge?

The University of Texas Course Catalogue included some thought provoking questions:

• Does chick art have a consistent message, including about what it means to be a chick?
• Is it empowering, disabling, conflicted?
• What about men’s place in this rhetoric?
• What messages does chick art have about men?
• What are the political and social ramifications of texts a niche art form for women that men often do not participate in?

Can a literary community that praises Woolf’s cry for a feminine narrative afford to marginalize the voices of contemporary female authors who fall under the label “chic lit” or “mom lit”? I think that would be a grave oversight. So in addition to our discussions of classic writers, I will be adding interviews with contemporary female authors as well as reviews of their work.