Celebrity Culture

In Understanding Celebrity, Graeme Turner defines celebrity as “a genre of representation and a discursive effect; it is a commodity traded by the promotions, publicity, and media industries that produce these representations and their effects; and it is a cultural formation that has a crucial social function we can better understand.” In this seminar, we aim to do just that. To this end, we will investigate the historical development of celebrity from the nineteenth century onwards, paying specific attention to the different media formats that gave rise to changing forms of celebrity (such as Hollywood’s star system vs what Kellie Burns calls “Celeb 2.0”). We will also focus on the multifaceted “uses” of celebrity as idols, activists, and promoters. As such, we will be investigating celebrity culture as both the culture that produces celebrities and the culture that is shaped by their presence.