Mapping the Stars: Celebrity, Metonymy, and the Networked Politics of Identity

Mapping the Stars: Celebrity, Metonymy, and the Networked Politics of Identity
Author: Claire Sisco King
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-07-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780814258804

Often dismissed as trivial or even "trash," celebrity culture offers a unique way of considering what it means to be human. In Mapping the Stars, Claire Sisco King shows how close analysis of the complex and sometimes contradictory forms of celebrity culture can challenge dominant ideas about selfhood. In particular, as a formation that develops across time, mediums, and texts, celebrity is useful for demonstrating how humanness is defined by relationality, contingency, and even vulnerability. King considers three stars with popular and controversial personas: Norman Rockwell, Will Smith, and Kim Kardashian. Working in very different contexts and with very different public images, these figures nonetheless share a consistent, if not conspicuous, interest in celebrity as a construct. Offering intertextual readings of their public images across such sites as movie posters, magazines, cinema, and social media--and deploying rhetorical theories of metonymy (a linguistic device linking signifiers by shared associations)--King argues that these stars' self-reflexive attention to the processes by which celebrity is created and constrained creates opportunities for reframing public discourse about what it means to be famous and what it means to be a person.

Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture

Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture
Author: Christopher J. Gilbert
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2024-11-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0817361707

Unraveling the intricate dance of pleasure and pain in contemporary American culture

Hollywood: Cultural dimensions: ideology, identity and cultural industry studies

Hollywood: Cultural dimensions: ideology, identity and cultural industry studies
Author: Thomas Schatz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2004
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780415281355

'Hollywood' as a concept applies variously to a particular film style, a factory-based mode of film production, a cartel of powerful media institutions and a national (and increasingly global) 'way of seeing'. It is a complex social, cultural and industrial phenomenon and is arguably the single most important site of cultural production over the past century. This collection brings together journal articles, published essays, book chapters and excerpts which explore Hollywood as a social, economic, industrial, aesthetic and political force, and as a complex historical entity.

Understanding Celebrity

Understanding Celebrity
Author: Graeme Turner
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2004-05-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1412933692

`Graeme Turner is one of the leading figures in cultural studies today. When his gaze turns to celebrity, the result is a readable and compelling account of this most perplexing and infuriating of modern phenomena. Read on!' - Toby Miller, New York University We cannot escape celebrity culture: it is everywhere. So just what is the cultural function of celebrity? This is the first comprehensive overview of the production and consumption of celebrity from within cultural and media studies. The pervasive influence of contemporary celebrity, and the cultures it produces, has been widely noticed. Earlier studies, though, have tended to focus on the consumption of celebrity or on particular locations of celebrity - Hollywood, or the sports industries for instance. This book presents a broad survey across all media as well as a new synthesis of theoretical positions, that will be welcomed by all students of media and cultural studies. Among its attributes are the following: -It provides an overview and evaluation of the key debates surrounding the definition of celebrity, its history, and its social and cultural function -It examines the 'celebrity industries’: the PR and publicity structures that manufacture celebrity -It looks at the cultural processes through which celebrity is consumed -It draws examples from the full range of contemporary media - film, television, newspapers, magazines and the web

Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood

Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood
Author: Allison L. Rowland
Publisher: Rhetoric and Materiality
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2020-04-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780814255827

Examines gut microbes, fetuses, and gym-goers in three case studies to critique the discursive practices of inclusion into humanhood.

Critical Theory Today

Critical Theory Today
Author: Lois Tyson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2012-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136615563

Critical Theory Today is the essential introduction to contemporary criticial theory. It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness. This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.

Advancing Digital Humanities

Advancing Digital Humanities
Author: P. Arthur
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2014-12-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 113733701X

Advancing Digital Humanities moves beyond definition of this dynamic and fast growing field to show how its arguments, analyses, findings and theories are pioneering new directions in the humanities globally.

Masculinities

Masculinities
Author: R. W. Connell
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2005
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745634265

This is an exciting new edition of R.W. Connell's ground-breaking text, which has become a classic work on the nature and construction of masculine identity. Connell argues that there is not one masculinity, but many different masculinities, each associated with different positions of power. In a world gender order that continues to privilege men over women, but also raises difficult issues for men and boys, his account is more pertinent than ever before. In a substantial new introduction and conclusion, Connell discusses the development of masculinity studies in the ten years since the book's initial publication. He explores global gender relations, new theories, and practical uses of mascunlinity research. Looking to the future, his new concluding chapter addresses the politics of masculinities, and the implications of masculinity research for understanding current world issues. Against the backdrop of an increasingly divided world, dominated by neo-conservative politics, Connell's account highlights a series of compelling questions about the future of human society. This second edition of Connell's classic book will be essential reading for students taking courses on masculinities and gender studies, and will be of interest to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences.

Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts

Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts
Author: John Hartley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2003-12-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134492065

This is the third edition of an up-to-date, multi-disciplinary glossary of the concepts you are most likely to encounter in the study of communication, culture and media, with new entries and coverage of recent developments.

A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory

A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory
Author: Raman Selden
Publisher:
Total Pages: 180
Release: 1989
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN:

Unsurpassed as a text for upper-division and beginning graduate students, Raman Selden's classic text is the liveliest, most readable and most reliable guide to contemporary literary theory. Includes applications of theory, cross-referenced to Selden's companion volume, Practicing Theory and Reading Literature.