We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
CONSUMER EXCESS, OBJECT BULIMIA AND ALL THINGS PLENTIFUL.
- Authors
Alb, Anemona Nemona
- Abstract
As gluttony or greed both represent a possible facet of the gastronomic experience, in this paper I set out to look at how greed in its shopaholic stance is instantiated in several chick lit novels - the term chick lit means literature for chicks, i.e. young ladies - or more specifically in what I term 'object bulimia' or modernist rationality gone bad in postmodernism. Indeed it is part and parcel of the current Zeitgeist, l'air du temps for people to engage in excess, to revel in consumer cornucopia. The new forms of feasting (as opposed to fasting in the Bakhtian vein), of engaging in consumption of the horn-of-plenty of goods and services in consumer society, that include shopaholism (i.e. a form of ideological alcoholism, the addiction to shopping) and the consummate shopaholic are the subject-matter of many a chick lit novels.Equally saliently, a cultural avatar of the shopaholic - the y.u.p.p.ie / the upwardly-mobile career woman, whose gluttony is of a more utilitarian nature in the sense that she needs to make room at the top for herself, but room at the top is never enough, her corporate greed obscuring all other existential areas, as Bridget Jones miserably shows in her - aborted - trajectories in Disturbia, or personal Hell. The two chick lit novels I am looking at in this paper for textual evidence of the above are Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999) and Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic Abroad (2001). And last but not least, it is up to men - according to Candace Bushnell (the author of Sex and the City published in 1996) - to generate alternative paradigms to consumerism and shameless indulging in cornucopia and to herald the way out of this paradigmatic labyrinth, indeed to attempt metanoia, i.e. a change in the mindset, in the mental arrangement of our female protagonists. The way to do this is to overtly engage in minimalism.
- Subjects
CORNUCOPIAS; CONSUMERISM; BULIMIA; MINIMALISM (Literature); GLUTTONY in literature; CHICK lit
- Publication
Annals of the University of Oradea, Romanian Language & Literature Fascicule / Analele Universităţii din Oradea. Seria Filologie, Fascicula Limba şi Literatura Română, 2011, p109
- ISSN
1224-7588
- Publication type
Article