This dissertation examines the anxieties that the contemporary genre of women’s fiction known as "chick lit" expresses about female sexuality, women and work, and the relationship between female identity and the global consumer marketplace. Furthermore, this project argues that chick lit can be productively traced to male-authored canonical texts that establish tropes and themes that chick lit novelists still grapple with at the turn of the twenty-first century. Chick lit heroines have benefitted from feminist progress, but they frequently participate in a backlash against the advances that empower them to pursue sexual pleasure outside marriage, find fulfilling careers, and challenge constructions of identity. Chapter 1 examines scholarship on constructions of gender and sexuality, affect theory, and Marxist theories. It also explores historical context through critiques of popular women writers. Chapter 2 argues that Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) establishes the first-person confessional narrative voice and a sexualized secondary female character who is punished for her non-normative sexuality. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada (2003) demonstrate that female sexuality must still be negotiated and contained in postfeminist culture. Chapter 3 explores how work contributes to female agency in literature. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) depicts a heroine who successfully manages her gender, race, and class performances in order to thrive in an urban space, while Kate Reddy, from Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002), must pass as a non-mother in order to participate in the affective economies that prevail in the gendered workplace. Chapter 4 analyzes the role of consumer culture in female subject formation in a capitalist material culture. In Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and Blake Edwards’s film version (1961), heroine Holly Golightly’s proximity to the luxury retailer legitimates her identity. But in Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic (2000), heroine Becky Bloomwood struggles against a shopping addiction and strives to define herself outside of the discourse of consumerism. Overall, this dissertation provides an important contribution to the conversation on women’s writing and contemporary identity formation because it addresses literary criticism, contemporary culture, and constructions of female subjectivity.

Thesis advisor: Elizabeth K. Wallace / This thesis uses a cultural studies approach to study the contemporary "chick lit" genre. These novels written by women, for women may be dismissed as frivolous, but their immense popularity proves that they have tapped into a cultural tension. Their target readers are young women who have grown up in a post-feminist revolution society and face unique issues unknown to any other generation of women. Blending feminist, Marxist, and formalist theories, this thesis attempts to discover how this genre functions in contemporary society – what does it do to its readers? While trying to respect the readers at all times, this thesis will discuss the failure of the genre to provide a new space for women to escape to. The conclusion discusses the potential of chick lit to do more; the genre has captured a "zeitgeist" among young women and its popularity reaches a wide audience. In the future, chick lit could serve as a genre that discusses women's issues, prompting its readers to question gender roles, consumerism, and the global status of women. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2006. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to examine how the gender system is described in chick lit. The analysis is based upon seven chick lit novels. The primary theoretical point of departure is Yvonne Hirdman’s theory about the gender system, the hierarchical order and the separation of the sexes. Also Carin Holmberg’s theory about how gender is constructed and the asymmetrical role taking among young couples and Anna G. Jónasdóttir’s theory about the distribution of love power in relationships are part of the theoretical framework. The method used is a textual analysis. A model of analysis has been constructed based on the theoretical points of departure mentioned above. The themes of the model are the separation of the sexes, the creation and maintenance of the gender system and the asymmetrical role taking. The result shows that the gender system is very distinct in chick lit, which is shown in particular in the separation of the sexes and how the women’s self-esteem is depending on men’s approval, thus making women subordinate to men. The conclusion is that chick lit describes a traditional gender system where the hierarchical order of the sexes is evident. / Uppsatsnivå: D

Libraries are often associated with positive values such as democracy and equal rights. The contents of the literature on offer should therefore be of great interest to the librarian, the supplier of said literature. The topic of this Master’s thesis is the popular literary genre known as chick lit. The purpose is to investigate the love theme in Swedish chick lit, and how it relates to Anthony Giddens’ theory on love in late modernity. The genre in this instance is represented by Mossvikenfruar: Chansen by Emma Hamberg. The theoretical anchor of the Master’s thesis is sociology of literature, which focuses on the relationship between literature and society. The starting point for the analysis of the love theme is Anthony Giddens’ theory on love and late modernity. A modified version of Shlomit Rimmon-Kenans thematical method is used as an analytical tool. The reality of love is considerably bleaker (albeit humourously described) in Mossvikenfruar: Chansen than in the writings of Giddens. The similarities, however, are great. The novel contains manifestations of ‘plastic sexuality’, set apart from reproduction, and the relationship between the novel’s protagonists can be seen as an example of Giddens’ description of couple-relationship in late modernity. Although the novel ends on a heteronormative, couple-centrered note which can be considered conservative and repressive, it is argued in this Master’s thesis that it must be valued in the light of the following question: “What constitutes an equal society?” a discussion which therefore concludes the study. / Uppsatsnivå: D

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In the mid-2000s, novels written by Indian women featuring a single woman's adventures in work and romance joined a transnational genre of writing called "chick lit" epitomized by novels such as Bridget Jones's Diary (Fielding 1996) and Sex and the City (Bushnell 1997). While chick lit has garnered some scholarly attention (Ferriss and Young 2006; Gill 2007; Harzewski 2011), studies remain largely focused on Anglo-American writing even while acknowledging the genre's global spread. There has been no in-depth analysis of chick lit written by Indian women in India, and it is this lacuna that this study seeks to fill.;The emergence of chick lit in India roughly a decade after economic liberalization makes the novels a useful lens through which to observe the formation of a new feminine neoliberal subjectivity - "the Indian singleton". I argue that the discourse of singleness in Indian chick lit novels is deployed not so much to solve the problem of being unmarried, but to resolve the tension between the demands of "Indian tradition" on urban, middle-class, young women and their desire for a selfhood inflected by transnational, neoliberal discourses of autonomy. By shifting my analytical focus away from the protagonist and her romantic partner to the mother-daughter relationship in the novels, I show how "tradition" and "modernity" are crystallized through discourses of food, fashion and the body. While "tradition" and "modernity" are conceptualized in these narratives as a binary, the protagonists seem to be attempting to articulate a selfhood that merges the two poles without having to pick a side. I draw on postcolonial, poststructuralist and feminist theory to argue that in their refusal to conform to ideas of Indian selfhood wherein individualism is circumscribed by community, the single women in Indian chick lit present, if not entirely represent, the idea of synthesis.

This thesis focuses on the way in which slanguage, treated as a way of characterization, is rendered in the Lithuanian translation of Marian Keyes’s chick lit novel Anybody Out There (2006) by Regina Šeškuvienė (2007). The main characters in the novel are women who use slang words and swear words in different situations both at work and their personal lives. In this respect, these women are different from traditional heroines of the romance who tend to use language in a traditionally feminine way, i.e. their language is polite and suited to reflect their impeccably feminine character. Swear words for heroines of chick lit serve as a means to express their oftentimes excessive and not always socially approved emotions and attitudes. The use of proper and specific slang helps them to make their conversations sound informal, to show familiarity and friendliness and to speak about uncomfortable issues such as sexual orientation or drug addiction. Slanguage becomes a significant means of characterization in Anybody Out There. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to analyse how the use of language by female characters reveals their character in the source text and in the target text and how slanguage as a means of characterization functions in the Lithuanian translation of the novel. The thesis consists of two main parts, theoretical and analytical. The material and the aim of the thesis are presented in the introduction. Chapter two presents the theoretical background of the... [to full text] / Šiame darbe nagrinėjamos slengo kalbos kaip charakterizavimo priemonės vertimo strategijos airių rašytojos Marian Keyes „chick lit“ romano „Ar ten kas nors yra?“ („Anybody Out There“, 2006 m.) lietuviškame vertime. „Ar ten kas nors yra?“ 2007 m. į lietuvių kalbą išvertė vertėja Regina Šeškuvienė. Pagrindinės romano herojės yra moterys, kurios įvairiose gyvenimo situacijose vartoja slengo žodžius ir keiksmažodžius. Šiuo aspektu jos yra nutolusios nuo tradicinių romano herojų, kurios vartojo gražią, taisyklingą kalbą. „Chick lit“ žanro moterims keiksmažodžiai yra būdas išreikšti savo požiūrį, jausmus ir emocijas. Paprasto ir specifinio slengo žodžių vartojimas joms padeda išvengti formalumo pokalbiuose, parodyti draugiškumą, familiarumą bei leidžia nevaržomai kalbėti tokiomis nepatogiomis temomis kaip seksualinė orientacija ar priklausomybė narkotikams. Slengo kalba romane „Ar ten kas nors yra?“ tampa svarbia herojų charakterizavimo priemone, todėl šio darbo tikslas – išanalizuoti, kaip romano herojų kalba atskleidžia jų charakterį originaliame tekste ir vertime. Šį darbą sudaro dvi pagrindinės dalys – teorinė ir praktinė analizės. Darbo tyrimo medžiaga ir tikslas yra pristatomi įžangoje. Antrą teorinės dalies skyrių sudaro keturi poskyriai, kuriuose aptariama slengo kilmė, apibrėžimas, slengui būdingi požymiai, slengo funkcijos ir slengo kalbos klasifikacija. Šiame skyriuje taip pat yra apžvelgiamos slengo kalbos vertimo problemos ir vertimo strategijos. Trečiame skyriuje... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

Spätestens seit Beginn der Gastarbeitermigration ab Mitte der 1950er Jahre geistert der Begriff Integration meist als unbestimmte Anpassungsforderung an Zugezogene durch Deutschland. Dabei haben die Eingliederungsprozesse von Türken und ihren Nachkommen bis heute besonderes Gewicht. Ziel der Dissertation ist es, anhand deutsch-türkischer Gegenwartsliteratur festgefahrene Denkmuster im Integrationsdiskurs zu hinterfragen und neue Perspektiven hierzu aufzuzeigen: Was ist Integration, wer integriert sich in was und warum? Die Arbeit untersucht, welche Integrationsmodi und -typen in der ausgewählten Literatur artikuliert werden, mit welchen Parametern Integration verknüpft ist und welche Faktoren als entscheidend für eine gelungene oder gescheiterte Integration gelten. Gegenstand sind Texte türkeistämmiger Autoren der ersten und zweiten Generation, die zwischen 2007 und 2011 erschienen sind insbesondere die Romane Ali zum Dessert von Hatice Akyün und Cafe Cyprus von Yade Kara. Den theoretischen und methodischen Rahmen bilden die interkulturelle Literaturwissenschaft nach Norbert Mecklenburg und Michael Hofmann (u. a. zu Identitäts- und Differenzkonzepten), die sozialwissenschaftlichen Ausführungen zum Integrationsbegriff von Hartmut Esser sowie das Diskursverständnis und archäologische Analyseverfahren nach Michel Foucault. Zu den Ergebnissen gehören die Ästhetische und thematische Charakterisierung der deutsch-türkischen Gegenwartsliteratur, die Bestimmung des dem jeweiligen Text zugrunde liegenden Integrationsverständnisses sowie die Bewertung der künstlerischen Ausarbeitung und des Diskursbeitrags. Besonders erhellend ist die Analyse, wenn die Texte einen abweichenden Diskurs von jenem in den Medien, der Politik und Gesellschaft dominanten entwerfen und Aspekte verhandeln, die bislang nicht in soziologischen Konzepten berücksichtigt werden. Dann zeigen sich im Diskurs neue Formationen und für die Integration entscheidende Faktoren sowie damit eine divergierende Einschätzung der Integrationsrealität. / Since the onset of guest worker migration in the mid-1950s, the notion of integration has been coming up in Germany as the diffuse demand for adaptation on the part of the migrants. Up to the present day, the processes of integration of Turks and their offspring have carried particular weight. The goal of this dissertation is to explore German-Turkish contemporary fiction in order to call intransigent patterns of thought in the discourse on integration into question and develop new perspectives: What is integration, who integrates into what, and why? The dissertation analyzes the modes of integration literature articulates, the parameters with which integration is bound up, and the factors considered decisive for successful or failed integration. Its subject are writings by first- and second-generation authors of Turkish origin that have appeared between 2007 and 2011, in particular the novels Ali zum Dessert by Hatice Akyün and Cafe Cyprus by Yade Kara. The theoretical and methodical framework is derived from intercultural literary studies as according to Norbert Mecklenburg and Michael Hoffmann (e.g. on concepts of identity and difference); Hartmut EsserÕs sociological account of integration; and Michel Foucault`s notion of discourse and archaeological analysis. The dissertation accomplishes the aesthetic and thematic characterization of German-Turkish contemporary fiction, reveals on which concept of integration each text is based, and evaluates the texts aesthetic realizations and their contributions to the current discourse. The analysis proves particularly insightful in those instances in which literary texts project a discourse that deviates from that of the media, politics, and society, and treat aspects that sociology has hitherto neglected. In these instances, new discursive formations along with new decisive factors for integration arise, and it becomes necessary to evaluate the reality of integration differently.