You may have seen my thoughts on "Girls" before. I have many more thoughts that I am trying to tie together into some sort of narrative coherent enough for at least an article. I suspect that Hannah's impending move will provide lots more thought fodder next season. (What details will the show get wrong, one wonders?)
"Girls" is set in an otherworldly Brooklyn. The borough has been fictionalized out of its multi-cultural, socioeconomically diverse reality, (seemingly) solely populated by white, trust funded hipsters. Much has been written on these dynamics and their validity, and, indeed, they underpin the organizing principle of this volume. I started watching the show really angry about the lack of diversity until I realized what story Dunham is trying to tell: tales of a very inward-focused tribe. The main Girls aren't afraid of people of color. They don't know any. They aren't really interested in other white people, either - they're the navel-gazingest characters I've seen on TV since, I don't know, Seinfeld. In connection with this, what interests me is how these and other identity-focused questions impact the curious literary sensibility of the show, one that molds itself out of odd social dynamics, tribal modes of discourse, and an almost bookless world.
Midway through the third season, in a trajectory marked by increasing vapidity and hostility among the Brooklyn trust fund hipsters, Hannah and Shoshanna evoke literature and literary thinking in the middle of a drag-out fight. In response to being called "unstimulating" by Hannah, Shoshanna snorts, "What is this, a Jane Austen novel?" (She goes on to snort, "I'm so fucking sick of all of you.") The context of the argument is (fictional) years of resentment (played out in actual seasons), and it comes out in the fight in different versions of what each character says another "always does." Writing becomes a device on the show - the characters love hearing themselves put words together in a formalized speech.
I am interested in considering representations of literature and thinking on the show. How does the trope of the high culture novel (and maybe other literary tropes) pushes back against the "lower culture" aspects of the girls' lives? How does the show's depiction of life impact its art and art appreciation? How do the girls work out their own anxieties relating to thought and education and reading? How does the trope of the Jane Austen novel both articulate and press back against the world Dunham and her actors are creating? (Preliminary answers: through class/privilege, and through race.)
