Unit name | Celebrity Culture: Icons, Industry and Aesthetics |
---|---|
Unit code | ENGL30110 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | H/6 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
Unit director | Dr. Andrew Blades |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | Department of English |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
The study of celebrity offers provocative interdisciplinary possibilities for thinking about issues of performance, affect, gender, race, sexuality, and visual and cultural representation. The study of Celebrity may be new, but the cultural fascination with fame and the famous is ancient. This optional unit explores notions of celebrity—its bodies, images, aesthetics, texts and industry—in transhistorical contexts. We will think about issues of audience, spectacle, spectatorship, gender, race and economics, and their interaction. As well as literary texts, we will analyze films, visual culture and performances, drawing on a range of theoretical materials—from cultural and film studies, to queer and feminist theories—to better understand our obsessions with the bodies that we make mythic (or anti-mythic). Strands of inquiry may include: how stars perform and embody celebrity, such as the eighteenth-century star actress Sarah Siddons, later posed in tableau vivant by Bette Davis; the figure of the black athlete and its racialised, gendered and economic performance legacies, from the nineteenth century’s ‘Hottentot venus’ Saartjie Baartman and minstrelsy to the Ziegfeld Follies. We may look at ‘starmakers’—from Cecil B. De Mille to Andy Warhol, and photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe and Leibowitz—focusing on how writers interpret, document, and make celebrity, e.g. Janet Flanner on Josephine Baker; David Foster Wallace on David Foster Wallace; Wayne Koestenbaum on Jackie Kennedy; Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara and Rita Dove on Billie Holiday. And we may think about how political voices, singing voices, and stage voices are constructed, deconstructed and mythologized—from the Greek chorus, to politicians and opera singers. Students will be provoked to think about how celebrity voices and bodies, and our own, are changed and shaped by new forms of media culture.
Upon successful completion of this unit, students will be able to:
1 x 1 hour seminar
1 x 1 hour lecture
1 x 1 hour discussion / workshop
Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (Routledge, 2001)
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1972; Vintage Classics, 2009)
Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton University Press, 2010)
Wayne Koestenbaum, Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (2009; Picador, 2013)
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Penguin, 2015)
Mary Simmons, Body, Knowledge, Performance (Oxford University Press, 2013)