Inconclusive Conclusions

I believe that the previous posts have adequatley summarized many of the topics and debates we incurred over the course of this blog and therefore I do not want to take away from these by adding my own repetitive version. We have already agreed that we are not going to all agree (and wouldn't this be boring if we did?), and therefore I wanted to summarize the points that I believe we may have reached a conclusion on, in comparison to the things that gave us more troubles.

What We Know....

Chicklit is a marketing term that refers to
a certain type of books primarily written
for and read by women.

The Only Trouble is...

Is Chick Lit a real, definable and containable thing, or is it fake and impossible to truely define?

What We Know....

Bridget Jones' Diary is Chick Lit. Cranford
might be Chick Lit.

The Only Trouble is...

Is How to be Good Chick Lit? Can itbe Chick Lit with a less stereo typical narrator and a male author? If not, what is it? Is Cranford ONLY Chick Lit? What else is it?

What We Know....

Gender is complicated. It is hard to set
limitations or expectations on gender,
and therefore it is hard to set limitations
and expectations on genre based on a gender.

The Only Trouble is...

Can gender can be contained in genre? Can genre be limited by gender?

What We Know....

Point of view is significant in Chick Lit.

The Only Trouble is...

How is point of view significant in Chick Lit, and is this a defining feature?

What We Know....

There is Performance by females in the books we have studied.

The Only Trouble is...

What does female performance mean? Does it make Chick Lit not Chick Lit in the Darwinian sense, or is there another answer?

What We Know....

Internal Identity formation and reformation, and particularly independence (usually female independence) seem to be central is Chick Lit.

The Only Trouble is...

What makes this improtant to ChickLit as a genre, and perhaps not as
important to others (such as Lad Lit).

What We Know....

We want to know what Chick Lit is.

The Only Trouble is...

We cannot determine what Chick Lit is.

To conclude, I feel that we cannot reach a difnitive conclusion on what Chick Lit is anymore than we could reach a difinitive conclusion on what a woman is, or what any complex category such as these are. A category is, to borrow Prof. Ogden's phrase to describe Darwin, a heuristic. There will never be a perfect definition or Chick Lit, and therefore we cannot hope to have an answer be it in 8 or 9 weeks, 8 or 9 years or 8 or 9 generations.