This book brings together some of the seminal interventions which have structured the development of star/celebrity studies, while crucially combining and situating these within the context of new essays which address the contemporary, cross-media and international landscape of today's fame culture. At the core of the collection is a desire to map out a unique historical trajectory – both in terms of the development of fame, as well as the historical development of star/celebrity studies
Author(s): Sean Redmond and Su Holmes
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Year: 2007
Language: English
Tags: Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Cinema
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: What’s in a Reader?
Section I - Star and Celebrity Culture: Theoretical Antecedents
1 The Nature of Charismatic Domination
2 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
3 The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
4 Myth Today
‘THAT-HAS-BEEN’; The Pose; The Luminous Rays, Colour; Amazement; Authentification
5 The Ecstasy of Communication
Section II - The Analysis of Fame: Understanding Stardom
6 The Powerless ‘Elite’: Theory and Sociological Research on the Phenomenon of the Stars
7 Stars
Heavenly Bodies
8 Stars as a Cinematic Phenomenon
9 Re-examining Stardom: Questions of Texts, Bodies and Performance
10 From Beyond Control to In Control: Investigating Drew Barrymore’s Feminist Agency/Authorship
Section III - Fame – Remember My Name?: Histories of Stardom and Celebrity
11 The Emergence of the Star System in America
12 The Assembly Line of Greatness: Celebrity in Twentieth-Century America
13 ‘Torture, Treacle, Tears and Trickery’: Celebrities, ‘Ordinary’ People, and This is Your Life (BBC, 1955–65)
14 Celebrity and Religion
15 The Dream of Acceptability
Section IV - Producing Fame: ‘Because I’m Worth It’
16 The Economy of Celebrity
17 Sharon Stone in a Gap Turtleneck
18 Who Owns Celebrity?: Privacy, Publicity and the Legal Regulation of Celebrity Images
19 Celebrity CEOs and the Cultural Economy of Tabloid Intimacy
20 From the Altar to the Market-Place and Back Again: Understanding Literary Celebrity
Section V - Made in Culture: Star and Celebrity Representations
21 The Face of Garbo
22 The Whiteness of Stars: Looking at Kate Winslet’s Unruly White Body
23 The Hollywood Latina Body as Site of Social Struggle: Media Constructions of Stardom and Jennifer Lopez’s “Cross-over Butt”
24 ‘Ozzy Worked for Those Bleeping Doors with the Crosses on Them’: The Osbournes as Social Class Narrative
25 Mobile Identities, Digital Stars, and Post-Cinematic Selves
Section VI - Consuming Fame/Becoming Famous?: Celebrity and Its Audience
26 With Stars in Their Eyes: Female Spectators and the Paradoxes of Consumption
27 A Star is Dead: A Legend is Born: Practicing Leslie Cheung’s Posthumous Fandom
28 Doing It For Themselves? Teenage Girls, Sexuality and Fame
29 Media Power: Some Hidden Dimensions
Index
