135054 PS Social History of Literature (PS): Worldliterature - Womens' Literature: Common Grounds (2017W)

World literature - euro- and androcentric canon, sum of all texts and/or globally circulating literature? Women's fiction - not very prestigeous subcategory, feminist empowerment strategy and/or marketing gag? It depends on the definition of these two much discussed terms of general and comparative literature if they cross each others path or remain largely isolated.
If women's fiction is understood as literature written by women and world literature as some sort of inter-/transnational canon, then books by women that have been translated (or written in English in the first place) and widely disseminated represent the most obvious link between the discourses of world literature and women's fiction. A precondition for circulation is recognition, which might be gained through prestige (literary prices, reviews in feuilletons) or else through sales figures; so called bestsellers travel fast and wide. A relatively recent example is Chick lit, the so-called "New Woman's Fiction". Originally defined as an Anglo-American phenomenon, starting with the bestseller “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (1996), Chick lit has spread rapidly across various linguistic and cultural markets. There is a broad consensus about this being a transfer from ‘the center’ to ‘the periphery’, from the ‘original’ genre to numerous adapted subgenres. For the latter the problematic term Ethnic Chick lit has been established, which in the broadest sense includes Women’s Fiction by authors, who have others than so-called „western“ sociocultural backgrounds. The marginalisation and homogenisation of contemporary women’s fiction through the Ethnic Chick lit label shall be analysed with the help of selected examples from the global north as well as from the global south.
The aim in the seminar is to question the predominantly Anglocentric perspective in this theory-driven research and to illustrate local particularities behind the global labelling.