Back To School
A friend sent me a link that has made me re-think my undergrad choice after all these years. Yeah, sure, college has been over for….well, a long time. And, yeah, I met my hubby in undergrad, so it’s kind of special. But, I swear I would have paid more attention - gone to class even - if my school offered a class like this one at the University of Illinois:
"Women in the Literary Imagination," which is an overview of the chick lit genre, a new genre of women’s literature that is post-feminist and focuses on strong, quirky, comical females and the issues they face. One of the course’s required readings is Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary.
One student said:
Combining (the chick lit class) with the historical section made me understand how the discourse of money, marriage, sex and feminism really evolved in the 200 years between Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Hey, me too! Really, I think that every time I read chick lit. Okay, I don’t. Really, I think: "I wish I could write in first person without sounding like an idiot." But, that’s almost the same as understanding the discourse of, uh, whatever.
I do have to wonder if being "forced" to read chick lit for a class, rather than reading it for pure enjoyment, would make me dread the genre. After all, some evil professor made me read Joyce and Beckett and I’m not exactly a huge proponent of either one of those two these days.
September 19th, 2005 at 10:02 am
Okay, wow, I met my hubby as an undergrad, too. That’s pretty cool.
I think this class looks very intersting, but I have to wonder if it wouldn’t get the big brush off from most students who would assign it blow-off class status. I dated a guy in college who took Film appreciation, and he had to go watch movies every week which never seemed like a hardship. In fact, my husband took History of Rock and Roll in college and we still joke about it. But he loved the class.
I think literature classes in any genre are very interesting. When you read a book with an eye for the subtle it gives you a whole new perspective. But doesn’t it make you wonder if the writer isn’t shaking her head saying “Really, the fact that I chose a red dress instead of a green dress is just because I happened to flip open the Speigel catalog to that page. It’s really not that significant!”
September 19th, 2005 at 8:53 pm
I believe I think the same thing after reading really good first person.