195 research outputs found
Literary Stardom and Heavenly Gifts: Haruki Murakami (1949)
No full textFrom the volume's introduction: "That contemporary literary celebrity can be a global phenomenon is demonstrated by the example of Haruki Murakami. Globalization of literary production, Gaston Franssen reasons, has had major consequences for this author’s image: for instance, Murakami is frequently attacked in Japan by literary critics on account of the allegedly over-Western style and atmosphere that characterize his work, whereas he is frequently framed in Europe and the United States as an author who presents a penetrating analysis of Japanese culture. Intriguingly, Murakami boasts a broad fan base of loyal readers in both the West and in Japan, who will stand in line at bookstores for hours to buy his latest novel and who gather to share experiences at Murakami festivals. Franssen demonstrates that the author pits diffferent forms of literary authorship against each other in his work, expressing apparent criticism of the commercialization and mediatization of literature.
Introduction: Starring the Author
No full textLiterary celebrity is by now a familiar feat of contemporary literary culture, but it continues to raise complex questions about the history and development of fame, the interplay between the cultural marketplace and the official culture of critics and the canon, and the relation between authorial agency and public appropriation. This introduction addresses these questions by approaching literary celebrity as a merging of two discursive constructions: the celebrity-function and the author-function. By combining insights from celebrity studies, literary history and cultural memory studies, the introduction conceptualizes literary celebrity as a discursive construction with several variables, such as the author’s self-presentation, the circulation of his public identity, changing opinions on literature and writership, and the public afterlife of the author’s image
Gaston Franssen, Rick Honings (eds.), Idolizing Authorship: Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to the Present (Amsterdam University Press, 2017)
No full textA review of Gaston Franssen, Rick Honings (eds.), Idolizing Authorship: Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to the Present, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2017, 282 pp. € 89.</jats:p
The Silence of the Celebrity: J.D. Salinger (1919–2010)
No full textAfter a youth spent in high-society circles and the incredible success of his debut novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), J.D. Salinger withdrew from the literary limelight. His reclusiveness, however, made him only more famous. His worldly withdrawal became an important trademark: it led to a constant stream of gossip and wild speculations about his life and work. After his death, Salinger’s literary stardom is undiminished and has even found its way into popular culture. This chapter traces the construction of the Salinger myth that informs the author’s public persona. The chapter argues that the author’s reticence intensified the semantic and affective potential of his public image: by closing himself off, Salinger opened his authorial persona up to a wide range of interpretations
Allegories of Branding:How to Successfully Fail Charles Bukowski
No full textThe American author Charles Bukowski (1904-1984) has become an authorial brand – that is, a complex symbol that projects a set of associations onto commercial products. This brand emerges from interactions between the fields of creation, production, and reception. Bukowski himself fuelled this interaction by constructing a recognizable, albeit contradictory public figure: that of the successful loser. Focusing on the Dutch reception of Bukowski as a case study, I demonstrate how cultural producers and suppliers capitalize on this figure, invoking it to suggest that their products allow consumers to partake in the Bukowskian lifestyle. However, the contradictions inherent in the persona of the successful loser subvert this process. As a consequence, instances of Bukowskian branding appear as normative failures, as their very success belies the values associated with the author
An empirical investigation of the tribes and their territories: Are research specialisms rural and urban?
No full textWe propose an operationalization of the rural and urban analogy introduced in Becher and Trowler (2001). According to them, a specialism is rural if it is organized into many, smaller topics of research, with higher author mobility among them, lower rate of collaboration and productivity, lower competition for resources and citation recognitions compared to an urban specialism. It is assumed that most humanities specialisms are rural while science specialisms are in general urban: we set to test this hypothesis empirically. We first propose an operationalization of the theory in most of its quantifiable aspects. We then consider specialisms from history, literature, computer science, biology, astronomy. Our results show that specialisms in the humanities present a sensibly lower citation and textual connectivity, in agreement with their organization into more, smaller topics per specialism, as suggested by the analogy. We argue that the intellectual organization of rural specialisms might indeed be qualitative different from urban ones, discouraging the straightforward application of citation-based indicators commonly applied to urban specialisms without a dedicated re-design in acknowledgement of these differences
Self-management as management of the self: Future directions for healthcare and the promotion of mental health
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: In a recent attempt to update the 1948 World Health Organization definition of health as a state of complete well-being and absence of disease, it has now been proposed to change its emphasis to the ability to adapt and self manage in the face of social, physical and emotional challenges (Huber et al., 2011). The question how we should conceptualize such self-management, however, is rarely raised and its theoretical foundations remain largely unexplained. Still, to an increasing extent, scholars, health professionals, researchers, caretakers and policy makers emphasize the great potential of self-management strategies in somatic as well as mental healthcare. Patients, so the argument runs, should not be treated merely as objects of diagnosis and treatment, but as "expert clients", actively involved in the management of their own care. The advantages of this approach are considered twofold: it holds the prospect of more efficient and (cost)effective preventive and care strategies to promote mental health and well-being, and converges with recent research findings which acknowledge that incorporating the patients' subjective perspectives is beneficial to treatment progress. At the same time, it is clear that self-management in the context of mental healthcare poses profoundly challenging problems (Van Geelen, 2013; Van Geelen, 2014), as we need to take into account that it is often "the self" that is part and parcel of the problem in psychiatric and psychosomatic conditions (Kyrios et al., 2015; Santhouse, 2008; Sadler, 2007). In the context of mental healthcare, then, self-management confronts us with fundamental questions: what is our understanding of this self in psychosomatic and psychiatric settings, and how does that understanding, directly or indirectly, affect diagnoses, treatment plans and nosology in the fields of psychopathology and psychosomatic medicine? Answering such questions will also be of vital importance to a theoretically sound and practically relevant, implementable notion of self-management. Given the complexity of this subject matter, addressing such [End Page 179] problems requires an interdisciplinary approach, as we have argued in the introduction (Van Geelen & Franssen, 2017). A conceptual framework for self-management should integrate insights from a variety of disciplines, as it needs to acknowledge the multifaceted character of self-experience – with all its embodied, affective, cognitive, moral and social complexities. It is imperative, in other words, that insights in the structure and characteristics of self and self-experience as developed in humanities traditions – i.e., phenomenology, philosophy of mind and action, ethics, narrative theory – are brought into a dialogue with results obtained in psychiatric and psychosomatic research and practice
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