Full Description
The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best understood as a participant in the popular phenomenon of celebrity.
Presenting a persuasive argument as well as a chronicle of modernism's and celebrity's shared history, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity begins by unraveling the uncanny syncretism between Oscar Wilde's writings and his public life. Goldman explains that Wilde, in shaping his instantly identifiable public image, provided a model for both literary and celebrity cultures in the decades that followed. In subsequent chapters, Goldman traces this lineage through two luminaries of the modernist canon, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, before turning to the cinema of mega-star Charlie Chaplin. He investigates how celebrity and modernism intertwine in the work of two less obvious modernist subjects, Jean Rhys and John Dos Passos. Turning previous criticism on its head, Goldman demonstrates that the authorial self-fashioning particular to modernism and generated by modernist technique helps create celebrity as we now know it.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity
Critical Problem Solving: Modernism and Popular Culture
The Field of Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity
Considering Celebrity
Why Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity
1. Oscar Wilde, Fashioning Fame
Copying Oneself
Judging By Appearances in Dorian Gray
The Tragic Commodity
Deep Thoughts: Embodying the Subject in De Profundis
2. James Joyce and Modernist Exceptionalism
Styling the Author
"Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day"
"Famous Son of a Famous Father": Author, Character, Holy Ghost
The Dream of Immateriality
E.T.: The Extra-Textual
The Ghost of the Author
3. Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Celebrity
Elite By Association
Unstable Values
The Trademark of Time
Name of Constant Value
A Democracy of One
4. Charlie Chaplin, Author of Modernist Celebrity
Happy Endings
An Author Is Born
Sign of the Times
The Object of Celebrity
5. Rhys, the Obscure: The Literature of Celebrity at the Margins
That Obscure Abject of Desire
Bildung in the Dark
The Hidden Rhys
Wide Sargasso City
Posthuman Beings
Celebrity on the Margins
Epilogue. "Everybody who was anybody was there": After Modernism, After Celebrity, John Dos Passos
The Camera, I
The In Crowd
Stein and They, Hemingway
U.S.A. and Hem
Notes
Bibliography
Index
![What to Expect the 1st Year [3rd Edition] (What to Expect)](../images/goods/ar/work/imgdatag/14711/1471172090.JPG)
