OH MISTER DARCY!!!!!!!!

Over at the guaridan, there is a sprightly conversation regarding the defense of chic-lit.  Your hero impetuously dashed in to the fray, serving up a bodacious commentary:

Science fiction and "literary fiction" (actually Literature itself) has always been accused of not being actively engaged in confronting the current cultural problems, so this sort of objection isnt unique to chic(k)-lit.

Though I think you are rightly locating the ever present problem of art having to be "relevant" to culture, I think the deeper claim is that chic(k)-lit, and the "problems" it addresses are themselves de minimis--inherently nugatory. Moreover, the lightness that chic(k)-lit engages in is not the of the postmodern jouissance that Derrida enacted, but that of the vulgar bourgeois kind.


There is a large amount of ("dirty") humor in Shakespeare and Johnson was critical of his fondness for "quarrels" (ie, puns); but there is also a great amount of sincere human learning. If anything, I think perhaps one of the more substantial criticisms of chic(k)-lit is that it is one sided. Horace, after all, did goldenly write that poetry's purpose is to teach and delight (utile et dulce).


Chic(k)-lit writers basically made the choice to "sell out" which is just a pragmatic choice of living. Artistically, it is wrong, but from a careerist stand point, it is quite acceptable. You get to go to parties, hang out with boring bankers and lawyers (probably even marry one), tell bourgeois people that you are an "author," etc., but you don't get to be considered among the great writers of Literature. Take the money, but you should refrain from defending fad writing as literature.

In light of "bookgirl09"'s comment, I am inspired (perhaps dreadfully so) to take a certain set of Nietzsche's comments much more seriously.


I want to seriously say this, though I doubt it will be understood at all: can women be great artists? All the great philosophers have been male. All the great poets have been male. Almost all of the great philosophers have been poor, oppressed, sick, and weak. Almost all the great poets have been poor, oppressed, sick, and weak. Hardly any of them received PhDs or went to universities to become educated and THEN write great books: they all educated themselves, whenever and however they could.

Where are the women voices? *Do* women have a voice (yet)? Women have been equally shunted, and yet no secret MSS have been found, and no great woman writers have been published. Madam de Stael and Jane Austin, I do not believe, are accurate representations of what a real woman philosopher or literary woman could produce.

I for one, think it is time for a woman poet and woman philosopher on the scale of Plato and Shakespeare, and I think that until such a woman appears, there will be no more philosophical or literary advances. (I am aware, of course, of the “phallusy” of trying to envision a female artistic genius on the grounds of the received male notions.)