Word: lit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...dare denounce Opal Mehta? I refer, of course, to “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” the recently published chick-lit novel by sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan ’08 that first became famous for its singular inception, and then infamous for its not-so-singular authorship. The book’s merits and demerits aside, it is, in many respects, a product of Harvard and a reflection of our community...
...eighth), I ask that we pause for a moment and empathize with our embattled classmate. It should not be very difficult to do so if we honestly consider our own intellectual and cultural position. As a community, Harvard is more than complicit in the production of inauthentic chick lit, that regrettably pervasive genre of packaged pop culture easily digested by teenage girls. We encourage and even inspire it. Harvard, I am most distressed to recognize, is at risk of becoming a bit like chick lit itself. The ivory tower has fallen; in its place we have erected a shopping mall...
First-time authors dream of theirwork flying off the shelves--but not like this. One moment, Kaavya Viswanathan was a literary marvel, a Harvard sophomore with a reported $500,000 two-book deal and a highly touted chick-lit novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. The next, her publisher, Little, Brown, was recalling every copy of Opal from the shelves, like so many tins of bad salmon. The defect? Viswanathan, 19, had plagiarized dozens of passages from two young-adult novels by Megan McCafferty...
...only vaguely thought of becoming a writer,” Viswanathan told the New York Sun just over a year ago, claiming she wanted to be an investment banker. This is fine, I suppose. Writers shouldn’t always take themselves too seriously, and chick lit certainly has its place (I, for one, spend a small fortune on tabloids and track Nicole Richie’s weight like a stock analyst.) Furthermore, to argue that novels should be divorced from economic reality would be absurd and na?...
...brother and I met a beautiful Italian waitress in Florence who barely spoke English, she asked where we studied. “Princeton,” he said; she simply shrugged her shoulders. “Harvard,” I replied, and in a flash, her eyes lit up with excitement. “Harvard?! Amazing.” It is amazing—in a perverted and peculiar sense. We 6,600 students are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of collegians around the world, and yet we (along with our professors, our campus...