677 research outputs found
The feminization of fame from Rousseau to de Staël
No full textThis thesis seeks to address the literary, cultural and historical questions surrounding what I will suggest was the reconceptualization of fame in the second half of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth centuries. The only previous analyses of celebrity in this period by Leo Braudy and by Frank Donoghue have claimed categorically that even though a democratization of fame occurred in this period only men had sufficient access to the fame machine and thus to the experience of the frenzy of renown. While I argue that this period witnessed the birth of modern concepts of celebrity, I will suggest that a modernization necessarily entailed a feminization of fame.
Traditionally, heroic self-sacrifice had led to assured immortality, but with the rapidly expanding print culture of this period, celebrity was often instantaneous, achieved during a lifetime rather than a lifetime achievement. With the dissemination of the media, the rise of newspaper and periodicals and thus, more importantly, the increasing visibility of the celebrity as a person to be admired and emulated came the means to seduce an eager audience by manipulating one’s career or personal image. Opening with an examination of the confessional politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who sought and found a desiring audience for this outpouring of private sensibility and thus initiated a discourse of fame which no longer relied upon the classical stoicism apparent since Ancient Rome, I will investigate how women writers not only ‘puffed’ themselves in the press, but actively engaged in constructing distinct authorial personae in and through their writings. Far from cowering anonymously in the shades, women writers were actively seeking and achieving the limelight, attaining a level of cultural centrality previously thought by critics such as Braudy and Donoghue to be unattainable. Embracing the public and publicity itself, they took advantage of the shifting mechanics of celebrity to place their writings and, ultimately, themselves, on the rostrum, more than eager to gain literary laurels
Guralnick speaks at Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum about 'I Got a Woman'
No full textIncludes descriptive metadata provided by producer in MP3 file: "Listen to Peter Guralnick, the 2007 Gertrude and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writer at Vanderbilt and author of definitive biographies of Elvis Presley and Sam Cooke, as he lectures on the origins and impact of Ray Charles' record 'I Got a Woman' at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in downtown Nashville. The April 19, 2007, event marked Vanderbilt University's first lunchtime lecture in cooperation with the hall of Fame." Michael Gray of the Hall of Fame introduces Guralnick, who speaks in the Ford Theater. Gail Carr Williams, Associate Director of Community, Neighborhood and Government Relations at Vanderbilt, also speaks, and Guralnick takes questions after his lecture. The event is part of the SoBro Sessions, a series co-sponsored by the Hall and Vanderbilt
Emily Dickinson\u27s Funeral and the Paradox of Literary Fame
No full textIn the months preceding her death on May 15, 1886, Emily Dickinson requested that Emily Brontë\u27s poem No coward soul is mine be read at her funeral, thereby enlisting Brontë\u27s defiant declaration of immortality in what can be interpreted as Dickinson\u27s own equally defiant final statement on the relation of fame to enduring art. Dickinson expressed the logic behind this request four years earlier in an 1882 letter to Roberts Brothers editor Thomas Niles in which she refused his request for a volume of poems (L749b) and instead sent him How happy is the little Stone (Fr1570E), a poem in which she alludes to the rock of immortality (l. 16) and the atom (l. 26) that appear in Brontë\u27s poem. These allusions inform Dickinson\u27s figurative declaration to Niles that the fame she seeks is based on fusion with the elemental fabric of the universe, not immediate approval from the contemporary reading public. Dickinson\u27s refusal to send Niles the volume he requested is consistent with the approach to fame she develops through poems such as To earn it by disdaining it (Fr1445) and her 1862 letter to Higginson in which she declares, If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her (L408). The path to fame Dickinson lays out through her funeral and other works like these paradoxically requires that the aspirant author risk obscurity by rejecting fame in the immediate present with the hope of attaining a more enduring form in the future. Dickinson\u27s association of lasting fame with rock takes on literal as well as metaphoric meaning when read in the context of Edward Hitchcock\u27s 1851 volume, The Religion of Geology and Its Connected Sciences, and contemporary linguistic theories espoused by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Richard Chenevix Trench
Geografia della fame: sessanta anni dopo!
No full textThe issue regarding the contrast between the potential population growth and the
potential increase in sustenance (alias, food supply) is as old as time. At the beginning of
the Fifties a book entitled “The Geography of Hunger” was published; the author, Josuè De
Castro, took stock of the multiple questions regarding the issues deriving from hunger and
malnutrition immediately after the Second World War. Since then, after about sixty years,
despite reality has experienced remarkable changes, the issue of hunger is still a living
matter. The following article will examine the “state” of World hunger as well as explore a
range of feasible solutions and strategies aiming at reaching a sustainable economic growth
in developing countries. The article will argue that the common denominator of all these
solutions and strategies is investing in productive, innovative and sustainable agriculture.La questione del contrasto tra la crescita potenziale della popolazione e il potenziale aumento del sostentamento (alias, approvvigionamento alimentare) è vecchio come il tempo. All'inizio degli anni Cinquanta viene pubblicato un libro intitolato “La geografia della fame”; l'autore, Josuè De Castro, ha fatto il punto sulle molteplici domande riguardanti i problemi derivanti dalla fame e malnutrizione subito dopo la seconda guerra mondiale. Da allora, dopo circa sessant'anni, nonostante la realtà abbia subito notevoli cambiamenti, il problema della fame è ancora vivo. Il seguente articolo esaminerà lo "stato" della fame nel mondo e esplorerà una gamma di soluzioni praticabili e strategie volte a raggiungere una crescita economica sostenibile nei paesi in via di sviluppo. L'articolo sosterrà che il denominatore comune di tutte queste soluzioni e strategie sta investendo in un'agricoltura produttiva, innovativa e sostenibile
Fortune and desire in Guillaume de Machaut
No full textThere is a pervasive tendency, in Machaut scholarship, to read his poetry as having
value only insofar as it speaks to our postmodern age: either it is fragmented and
riven with ambiguities, or it celebrates eroticism and the things of this world for their
own sake; in any case, it resists religious and moral orthodoxy. Such readings, while
often valuable in themselves, fail to take sufficient account of the influence which
Boethian and Neoplatonic ideas had upon Machaut, and thus misunderstand his work
on a fundamental level. By paying attention to the Boethian content in the narrative
dits, and by analysing Machaut's verse more thoroughly than has been done before,
my thesis demonstrates not only this author's moral orthodoxy, but also his extremely
sophisticated didactic methods. I begin with the Confort d'ami, Machaut's most
overtly moral work. The Confort engages with the supposed 'worldly' perspective of
its imprisoned addressee, adapting biblical and classical exempla in order to coax
Charles of Navarre towards a deeper understanding of worldly fortune. In Chapter 2 I
show how, in the Prologue and the Dit du vergier, the ambiguity so beloved of critics
can serve as a moral commentary on the carnality and self-absorption of the erotic
and artistic points of view. Having established, in the preceding chapters, that this
author's approach to his subject is ambiguous and critical, in Chapter 3 I explore the
extremes of his pessimism, and show how his love poetry can incorporate
sophisticated philosophical ideas, through my analysis of the Jugement du roy de
Behaigne. The thesis culminates in a detailed reading of the Remede de Fortune.
Through his deliberately idealised statements about education, through his application
of these views to the art of courtly love, through his composition (and setting to
music) of a sequence of virtuoso lyrics, and through his explicit invocations of and
borrowings from Boethius, Machaut develops an empathic but ultimately, as I argue,
deeply sceptical vision of earthly love
Recommended from our members
Reasserting moral boundaries : representations of fame in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda
No full textCelebrity culture is part of a long history of fame, but the modern celebrity individual came into focus in the nineteenth century. The first part of this thesis distinguishes modern celebrity – including its morality – from other types of fame, explores the intersection of celebrity and gender through the figure of the female literary celebrity, and discusses George Eliot’s desire to control her public persona in Victorian celebrity culture. Previous scholarship has paid little attention to celebrity in Eliot’s fiction, so the second part of this thesis provides a close reading of Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), as a means of attending to the connections between fame, artistic endeavor, and morality. I use Tom Mole’s three pillars of the celebrity apparatus (individual, industry, and audience) as a framework and reveal how the novel consistently relies on historically famed performers to help orient the reader. I read Daniel Deronda’s negative representation of pursuing art for the sake of celebrity as a reassertion of the same attitude that Eliot first established in her essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” twenty years prior. However, those twenty years cover Eliot’s increasing popularity as an author, thus necessitating her need to defend her motivation for continuing to write and publish. Therefore, Daniel Deronda also offers the additional assertion that renown is morally acceptable, a qualification that legitimizes Eliot’s fame while allowing her to still critique celebrity.Keywords: renown, fame, celebrity and gender, nineteenth-century British literature, performance arts, celebrity, George Eliot, morality and moral boundaries, Daniel Deronda, Victorian novel, Victorian celebrity culture, Tom Mole, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, celebrity apparatu
Unveiling Polish writers’ fame : the element of anachronism
No full textArtykuł poświęcony jest rekonstrukcji, uhistorycznieniu i analizie spóźnionej recepcji zjawiska sławy literackiej przez polską krytykę. Autor przekonuje, że figura pisarza-celebryty pozostaje w bliskiej relacji z modernistyczną koncepcją artysty i stanowi konieczny element kultury literackiej w demokratycznym kapitalizmie. W krajach zachodnich sława pisarzy ma długą historię i towarzyszą jej zaawansowane studia, a w Polsce mogła rozwinąć się dopiero po roku 1989. Autor pokazuje, jak bardzo dynamiczny był to rozwój i śledzi kolejne kroki zdezorientowanej, pozbawionej odpowiednich narzędzi i zawsze spóźnionej krytyki, której dużo czasu zajęło odkrycie, że pisarz-celebryta jest złożonym fenomenem decydującym o kształcie pola literatury, a nie prostym symptomem utowarowienia.The article reconstructs, historicizes, and analyzes Polish critics’ late reception of the phenomenon of literary fame. The author argues that the figure of a celebrity writer remains closely related to the modernist concept of the artist and is a necessary element of literary culture in democratic capitalism. In Western countries, writers’fame has a long, thoroughly studied history, whereas in Poland it has developed only after 1989. The author demonstrates the highly dynamic nature of this development and traces the subsequent steps of the disoriented, ill-equipped, and always-late critique. Moreover, the text shows that it took critics a long time to realize that the celebrity writer is a complex phenomenon shaping the literary field rather than just a mere symptom of commodification
Ohio impromptu, genre and Beckett on film
No full textSamuel Beckett’s choice of the title Ohio Impromptu to name the play first performed to an audience of academics and scholars at Columbus Ohio in 1981 is one manifestation of its author’s interest in the question of literary genre; more generally, in Beckett’s dramatic works one encounters a meticulous attention to the activity of categorisation, even if the energy is often directed toward the creation of phantom genres for spectral exemplars. This essay concerns itself with Ohio Impromptu in particular because by means of elements specific to this play (including the context in which it was first performed) it comments upon its own very failure to occupy its designated genre co-ordinates (these include its identity both as a play and as an ‘impromptu’). This play, which is so apt to incorporate other genres, however, is presided over by a stage direction which locates it firmly in the theatrical context. It is in its deliberate failure to attend to this stage direction that the Beckett on Film version of the play goes beyond the mere treacherous fidelity that is inevitably a feature of any adaptation. In arguing this, the essay analyses the foregrounding in the play of questions that can be said to pertain to genre (in several senses). Its more specific intention is to suggest that, via a combination of casting and special effects, the adaptation succeeds not only in cancelling the critical reflection on the ‘genre gesture’ that is lodged in Ohio Impromptu, but also in eradicating the very disjunction between Reader and Listener upon which the play depends
Richardson, Barbauld, and the construction of an early modern fan club
No full textMPhilMuch has been written about the life and long works of the eighteenth century epistolary novelist, Samuel Richardson, but the prospect of his position as the first celebrity novelist – responsible for courting his own fame as well as initiating his own fan club – has largely been ignored. The body of manuscripts housed at the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London provides the modern scholar with evidence of the skeletal beginnings of an early fan club. This thesis aims to show how these manuscripts were turned into a saleable commodity by the publisher and entrepreneur Richard Phillips, while under the guiding hand of another, slightly later, literary celebrity, Anna Laetitia Barbauld. In order to restore Richardson’s reputation amongst a new nineteenth century audience, Barbauld was required to construct her own idea of him as an eighteenth century celebrity author, and in doing so the insecurities of a self-professed, apparently diffident man, are revealed. Barbauld’s capacious, but heavily edited selection of letters is analyzed in this thesis, providing ample evidence that Richardson’s correspondents were more than just eager letter writers. By using Barbauld’s biography of Richardson this thesis aims to show how she manipulates the genre of life writing in her construction of him.
This thesis offers an alternative reading of how the Richardson manuscripts are viewed, redefining them as not simply a collection of letters, but as a collective entity, deliberately selected and archived as evidence of an early modern fan club, and its celebrity managing director
- …
