scholarly journals A Different Shade of Pink: Literary Thresholds and Cultural Intersections in Italian Chick Lit

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Federica Balducci
Keyword(s):  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Worldwide Phenomenon ◽  
Chick Lit ◽  
Anglo American

<p>This thesis investigates the Italian production of chick lit, a particular segment of contemporary women’s popular fiction developed in the mid 1990s in Anglophone countries. A worldwide phenomenon born out of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and the HBO TV show Sex and the City (1998), chick lit novels portray the professional, emotional and sentimental anxieties of white, middle-class, heterosexual and financially independent women in a witty and humorous tone. The arrival of chick lit and its successful translation into Italian in the late 1990s has prompted many local writers to engage with the genre, but the growing body of chick lit written in Italian and its place in the cultural and literary landscape have yet to be assessed. This thesis explores recurring themes, narrative strategies and stylistic features deployed in Italian chick lit novels not only against their Anglo-American models, but also in relation to Western popular media culture and the Italian tradition of romanzo rosa, its cultures and practices as well as its legacy. It shows the presence of distinct intertextual patterns in dealing with key generic features, such as the identification with the female protagonist and her journey toward self-empowerment, the relationship with consumerism and popular media culture, and the humorous style. This thesis also assesses the nature of chick lit as both a literary genre and a sociocultural phenomenon across countries and languages through theoretical perspectives of cultural studies and feminist theories on women’s popular culture and Western popular postfeminism.</p>

scholarly journals A Different Shade of Pink: Literary Thresholds and Cultural Intersections in Italian Chick Lit

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Federica Balducci
Keyword(s):  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Worldwide Phenomenon ◽  
Chick Lit ◽  
Anglo American

<p>This thesis investigates the Italian production of chick lit, a particular segment of contemporary women’s popular fiction developed in the mid 1990s in Anglophone countries. A worldwide phenomenon born out of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and the HBO TV show Sex and the City (1998), chick lit novels portray the professional, emotional and sentimental anxieties of white, middle-class, heterosexual and financially independent women in a witty and humorous tone. The arrival of chick lit and its successful translation into Italian in the late 1990s has prompted many local writers to engage with the genre, but the growing body of chick lit written in Italian and its place in the cultural and literary landscape have yet to be assessed. This thesis explores recurring themes, narrative strategies and stylistic features deployed in Italian chick lit novels not only against their Anglo-American models, but also in relation to Western popular media culture and the Italian tradition of romanzo rosa, its cultures and practices as well as its legacy. It shows the presence of distinct intertextual patterns in dealing with key generic features, such as the identification with the female protagonist and her journey toward self-empowerment, the relationship with consumerism and popular media culture, and the humorous style. This thesis also assesses the nature of chick lit as both a literary genre and a sociocultural phenomenon across countries and languages through theoretical perspectives of cultural studies and feminist theories on women’s popular culture and Western popular postfeminism.</p>

Emerging Afro-Parisian ‘chick-lit’ by Lauren Ekué and Léonora Miano

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-228
Author(s):  
Susanne Gehrmann
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Structural Power ◽  
Chick Lit ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Urban Working

This article examines the novels Icône urbaine (2005, Urban Icon) by French-Togolese writer Lauren Ekué and Blues pour Elise (2010, Blues for Elise) by French-Cameroonian/Afropean writer Léonora Miano, with regard to their contribution to chick-lit in a broad sense. With a focus on urban working women, their love lives and consumerism, these novels fulfil a number of criteria of mainstream chick-lit. At the same time, however, a serious concern for structural power relations is inscribed into these texts. Both novelists make ample use of intermedial writing such as structural borrowing from and references to music, TV formats and the fashion press. I will analyse these narrative strategies and address how far Ekué and Miano copy, rewrite and reinvent the Anglo-American chick-lit genre from the transnational perspective of the African Diaspora in France and considering the peculiarities of black Paris as a space.

Preschool children’s play and alignments in a bracketed framing of a music-technological breakdown

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-142
Author(s):  
Pernilla Lagerlöf ◽  
Louise Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Children's Play ◽  
Experimental Activity ◽  
Children’S Play

Music technologies are becoming important in children's play in everyday life, but research on children's communication and interaction in such activities is still scarce. This study examines three children's social interaction in an 'experimental' activity in preschool, when the music technology breaks down. Detailed analysis is carried out by using a Goffmanian approach. The findings illustrate the children's interpretive framings of the adult's introduction and their orientation to the technological material in order to perform different alignments and how they change footings. The children's social interaction is organised according to the playful framing of the bracketed activity. This suggests the significance to pay attention to children's definitions of situations and to consider children's experiences of participation in popular media culture.

Editors' introduction: Psychology of Popular Media Culture.

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-71
Author(s):  
James C. Kaufman ◽  
Joanne Broder Sumerson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Media ◽  
Media Culture

Pleasure as genre: popular fiction, South African chick-lit and Nthikeng Mohlele's Pleasure

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-184
Author(s):  
Ronit Frenkel
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Women's Fiction ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Chick Lit ◽  
Level Of Experience ◽  
The Trinity

The success of popular women's fiction requires a mode of analysis that is able to reveal the patterns across this category in order to better understand the appeal of these books. Popular fiction, like chick-lit, can be contradictorily framed as simultaneously constituting one, as well as many genres, if a genre is the codification of discursive properties. It may consist of romances, thrillers, romantic suspense and so forth in terms of its discursive properties, but popular women's fiction will also have a pattern of similarity that cuts across these forms – that similarity, I will suggest, lies in the idea of pleasure as a genre of affect that ties various popular fictions together, thereby acting as a type of imperial genre. Pleasure is so ubiquitous and so diverse across the multiple forms that constitute popular women's fiction that I argue it has become a genre in itself. This is, however, not a genre that limits itself to one particular stylistic form, but rather, as a dynamic social construct, it has become a genre of affect that invokes feelings of pleasure. Nthikeng Mohlele's most recent novel, Pleasure, exemplifies the applicability and plasticity of the concept of pleasure, allowing me to examine this work as a type of fictionalised theory which I then apply to South African chick-lit texts: the Trinity series by Fiona Snyckers and Happiness Is a Four-Letter Word by Cynthia Jele. Mohiele's expansive theorisation of pleasure is inherently local in that it is depicted at the level of experience and imagination; yet it is simultaneously macro and global in the connections made to deeply political circuits of identity-based oppressions and structural inequalities. Mohlele reveals the mobility of pleasure as a genre that offers an opportunity to think through the circuits that connect popular fiction through the lens of African literature.

Home Musical Environment of Children in Singapore

2008 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chee-Hoo Lum
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Classroom Practices ◽  
Peer Groups ◽  
First Grade ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Musical Play ◽  
The Media ◽  
Home Musical Environment

The home musical environments of a class of 28 first-grade children in Singapore were examined in this ethnographic study. Technology was an integral part of the soundscape in the home. The musical repertoire gathered was closely associated with electronic and pop-influenced music, approaching the styles favored by teens and adults. Particular musical styles and selections that the families listened to and watched through the media also fueled these children with a sense of ethnic identity and nostalgia. Children's popular media culture was part of these children's broader social repertoire, creating a shared frame of reference for their musical play and generating cultural capital that was valued within their peer groups. Consideration of the various contexts in which these children learn about music, where their musical identities are being shaped under the influences of their techno-, media-, and ethnoscapes (dimensions proposed by Arjun Appadurai), has implications for music education classroom practices.

Working Girls

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Ferriss
Keyword(s):  
Young Women ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Economic Empowerment ◽  
Brand Name ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Chick Lit ◽  
College Educated

This chapter argues that chick lit offers an inherent critique of women's economic precarity. Chick-lit novels have been criticized for glamorizing consumption and irresponsibly promoting unchecked consumerism in the young women presumed to be their audience. Certainly chick lit, like all popular media, is inextricably entangled in the capitalist system—an inevitable consequence, it could be argued, of postmodern culture itself. But critics have taken its references to brand-name goods and status as an endorsement of global capitalism. Sustained, critical attention to the texts, however, suggests otherwise. Far from sanctioning aspirational spending or endorsing economic empowerment, prominent chick-lit examples dramatize the precarious economic and social position of young, college-educated, British and American women (of various classes and ethnicities) under late capitalism.

Editor's introduction: Psychology of Popular Media Culture.

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 137-137
Author(s):  
James C. Kaufman ◽  
Joanne Broder Sumerson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Media ◽  
Media Culture
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document