Description
Book SynopsisFilled with insights into the works of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Rhys, and John Dos Passos, this is a provocative new reading of the relationship between modernist literature and the development of celebrity culture in the early twentieth century.
Trade ReviewGoldman's thesis is ably pursued and very useful. He situates 'celebrity' as the 'missing link' between high and low culture in modernism, and I think he has a point. * James Joyce Quarterly *
Table of 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
