Friday, June 03, 2005

Chick-Lit Defined

Welcome to photoblogging!
The series of pictures here were taken at Coles Books in Lougheed Mall. They help establish a functionalist definition of Chick-Lit. Recall in lecture that we decribed three ways of defining literary genres: the essentialist, the genetic and the funtionalist. So, according to functionalism, the genre of chick-lit is those books marketed as chick-lit.
Coles Books -- an excellent pruveyor of fine books -- tells us as much.



Here is their shelf display dedicated to the romance genre - which is exclusive of chick-lit. Proportionally a large percentage of the store. Not counting the genreal fiction section, only the science fiction & fantasy and the youth fiction genres are comparable. Pictures of their sections are below.

Nb. Click on each photograph for a larger image.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are "chick", "lad", "male", "female" essentialist terms?

Admin said...

My personal belief is no....however, some people might think they are, especially "male" and "female". People often take them for granted as terms that define qualities that are planted firmly in the world....unchanging, static, fixed, undisturbed by the passage of time, etc... I think that "male" and "female" are fleeting, blurring, constantly changing binaries.

Anonymous said...

I think that the terms male and female are problematic because we have sets of characteristic embedded in each of these categories. We stereotpye and generalized people in our society based on their gender. And when we place a specific gender category in literature, we begin to discriminate the other gender from reading it. And I see this as a problem.