engleski

The Young Woman as Writer in HBO's "Girls"

HBO's series Girls has been rightly criticized for its lack of diversity, but also praised as quality TV that portrays young women as complex characters, thus participating in contemporary debates on feminism and popular culture. In this paper I would like to analyze the ways in which this participation is formally realized through frequent use of metatextual commentary in the show, focusing specifically on the image of Hannah as a writer. The series utilizes Hannah's profession to anticipate and respond to some of the criticism aimed at the show, but also to address crucial questions concerning Hannah's art and, more generally, art made by young women: the relation between reality and fiction, autobiography and authenticity, triviality and literary merit. Hannah's writing is regularly judged as "whiny", self-obsessed, self-indulgent, too emotional and TMI – complaints heard significantly more often about fiction by women, especially young women and girls. In this way Girls represent some of the central preoccupations of feminist literary criticism: when male authors write about intimacy, as Kate Zambreno convincingly argues in Heroines, their work is read as fiction and taken seriously, while similar stories written by girls and women are regularly perceived as autobiographical and discarded as trivial and lacking artistic merit.

Girls ; feminism ; popular culture ; women writer

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