LITFILI *: Genre Expectations vs Social Commentary

Chick Lit is western, modern, and very feminist-oriented. There are many expectations from this genre. Surely it would contain fashion and sex related topics. Surely it would contain some sort of contemporary love story. But how about on the Social Commentary part? Chick Lit deems the upper-class western way of life as something quite desirable. Like those girls in Sex and the City who party every night and fuck around and have interesting and non-boring jobs.



It's seemingly promoting this form of desirable social status. And why is it desirable? Because next to being rock stars or movie stars, the next common dream would be to be in the advertising industry, or public relations, or fashion, or publishing. WHY? because these things are the closest to art that you can get without the risk of starving to death or being a bum. And we all want to be closer to art, for this is the only thing that keeps us from feeling that we are part of a machine or that our lives are full of meaningless and alienating processes.

So regardless of my preference for Chick Lit(I'm not very fond of it), as far as I'm concerned, writers can write whatever the hell they want to write and readers should, with caution of course, read whatever they want to read.

Now with crime fiction, I'm also not very fond of it. I do find forensics very interesting, but not fiction about it, I guess. CSI has very little continuity, and I guess the same goes for most crime fiction, because it would always be the same in the end: either you solve it which makes it cliche or you don't solve it and make your story annoying.

So which is more important? Genre expectations or social commentary? I think we shouldn't really think too much about it. Genre expectations are important but if we think too much about it then it would hinder the evolution of literature, reducing them to merely categorized objects and preventing them from transcending literary paradigms. The more we think of social commentary the more we'll be pulled away from fiction. I mean, it is important for a literary piece to have social commentary, but we also shouldn't forget that fiction is also some sort of imagination commentary(I'm not really sure what I mean by that).

For me, reading literature is like looking at a painting. we'll never really know what the writers really want to portray or express. all we'll ever have are speculations based on our own interpretations. Unless of course you really really want to, cause then you could interview the writer or go to his/her seminars.