Progress in hunt for Definition of Celebrity:
Cultural studies author David Marshall, in his book Celebrity and Power, calls much of modern popular celebrity discourse veiled individualist rhetoric. This is is going on top of my ever-growing stack of celebrity definitions.
More findings, including those from “Trademark Twain” chapter of Author’s Inc. by Loren Glass
The rise of consumer capitalism in the United States from 1880-1920 coincided with a notable increase in the publication of autobiographies by authors...they coincided, but were not a coincidence
Novels themselves became more autobiographical too––Little Women, Martin Eden etc. Eventually literary criticism took on more and more investigation into author’s lives as background for analysis of their work...again not a coincidence.
Twain was the one that most embodied this overlap of cultural performance of authorial personality and the generic reliance on authorial autobiography
As I said in my last blog, Twain never really distinguished between real-life and storied life. It could be said that his novels were actually just as autobiographical in one way or another than his actual autobiography.
An interesting quote from his preface to The Innocents Abroad reads: “I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of travel-writing that may be charged against me––for I think I have seen with impartial eyes and (italics mine) I am sure I have at least written honestly, whether wisely or not."
Twain got in trouble a young man, writing for the Territorial Enterprise by making up fictional stories and then publishing them as actual credible news stories.
One of his many aphorisms on truth, Twain once wrote “Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.”
Mark Twain corporatized himself. The Mark Twain Company, founded in 1908, which became the Mark Twain foundation in 1962, is now under control of the Manufacturers Hanover Trust, which is one of New York’s largest investment banks.
Theoretical Frameworks: Po-Mo
The more I study postmodernism, the harder it gets to define and the more I realize how counterintuitive and goofy it is. It just seems like the angry, left-out child among other theoretical frameworks that points out everyone’s shortcomings to make itself feel better. And that is my verdict for now. Maybe with more study I will find its true meaning...but that’s just it, isn’t it? It’s impossible to find meaning in a theoretical framework that is based on the impossibility of finding meaning. As Charlie Brown would say, "Oh drat!"
Friday, October 23, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
The Original Celebrity Death-Match? Hmmm...we'll see.
So, going back to week 5, a week which I failed to blog on, I am staying within the vein of sociology for this week’s blog...sociology in a more cultural-studies area...and cultural studies in the area of celebrity studies. And with that said, I would like to share that I am currently at the point in my research where it is looking like OTHER literary figures besides Mark Twain maybe were modern-style celebrities before him...namely the British poet Lord Byron, a.k.a George Gordon Byron a.k.a. the 6th baron of Rochdale, a.k.a the original British Heartthrob.
...this project may pan out to be the original celebrity death-match of Lord Byron v. Mark Twain. We’ll shall see.
So my main question right now is...What defines a modern celebrity? Of which I have checked out 6 books from the library on and intend to study over the weekend. But this week I looked at the...
Similarities between the careers of Twain and Byron! Here are some of my findings.
The poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” which was Based on Byron’s world travels, was what launched him into fame. This is much like how Mark Twain’s travelogue/novel The Innocents Abroad greatly broadened his fame.
Also the self portraiture in their work is similar. Twain and Byron basically wrote themselves into their stories and poems (not always completely non-fictionally)––and once readers fell in love with them as characters, they fell in love with them as authors and real people. Ghislane McDayter in his book (at I think it would be “his”––“Ghislane” is a male name, right? OR am I just a sexist for assuming so?) Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture, he writes that “Byron “survives in the valley of his saying” precisely because of his reluctance to create a recognizable divide between his life in history and his life in art.” This is almost EXACTLY how Twain operated––so much so that his literary executioner, Albert Bigelow Paine, claimed that when Twain was nearing death, his dictation of his life for his autobiography was completely in anecdotal form, and Twain himself could not (or would not) discern between what actually happened and what made great stories.
The argument/goal of the book makes it seem like a very worthwhile resource for me: “What this book will argue is not that Byron created celebrity but rather that his fame provides an ideal test case for examining the complex matrix of forces of what lead to what we now think of as celebrity.”...which is kind of how I would like to phrase what I’m doing in the case of Twain.
Both Twain and Byron have been named the “literary lion” or just the “lion” of their day by fans.
Both Twain and Byron had work (well, in Twain’s case it was more like quotations) that was attributed to them, but was not actually made by them...which could constitute as the early makings of celebrity gossip, couldn’t it?
Their work came out during the 19th century, with Byron near the beginning and Twain near the end, when the world was undergoing colossal political and industrial changes––much of which was driven by the evolution/modernization of printing. They used the technology to their benefit. Books became a commodity of the masses.
More on Byron:
Byron’s readers and fans went too far in admiring him when they took to making false books and poems (essentially, the first documented case of fan-fiction) and then published and sold them under his name. Copyright law at the time (which first was established about a century before) by the Statute of Anne in 1710) . And this, as one could imagine, ruined Byron’s already questionable reputation.
My friend, Ghislaine, makes the point that the same republican tendency that started the French revolution was the same that created the democratization of readership, and hence the literary mob/cult following of Byron. In his forming of a never-before-seen huge democratic readership, Byron eventually was overthrown by his fans.
MORE TO COME THIS WEEKEND! YAY.
...this project may pan out to be the original celebrity death-match of Lord Byron v. Mark Twain. We’ll shall see.
So my main question right now is...What defines a modern celebrity? Of which I have checked out 6 books from the library on and intend to study over the weekend. But this week I looked at the...
Similarities between the careers of Twain and Byron! Here are some of my findings.
The poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” which was Based on Byron’s world travels, was what launched him into fame. This is much like how Mark Twain’s travelogue/novel The Innocents Abroad greatly broadened his fame.
Also the self portraiture in their work is similar. Twain and Byron basically wrote themselves into their stories and poems (not always completely non-fictionally)––and once readers fell in love with them as characters, they fell in love with them as authors and real people. Ghislane McDayter in his book (at I think it would be “his”––“Ghislane” is a male name, right? OR am I just a sexist for assuming so?) Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture, he writes that “Byron “survives in the valley of his saying” precisely because of his reluctance to create a recognizable divide between his life in history and his life in art.” This is almost EXACTLY how Twain operated––so much so that his literary executioner, Albert Bigelow Paine, claimed that when Twain was nearing death, his dictation of his life for his autobiography was completely in anecdotal form, and Twain himself could not (or would not) discern between what actually happened and what made great stories.
The argument/goal of the book makes it seem like a very worthwhile resource for me: “What this book will argue is not that Byron created celebrity but rather that his fame provides an ideal test case for examining the complex matrix of forces of what lead to what we now think of as celebrity.”...which is kind of how I would like to phrase what I’m doing in the case of Twain.
Both Twain and Byron have been named the “literary lion” or just the “lion” of their day by fans.
Both Twain and Byron had work (well, in Twain’s case it was more like quotations) that was attributed to them, but was not actually made by them...which could constitute as the early makings of celebrity gossip, couldn’t it?
Their work came out during the 19th century, with Byron near the beginning and Twain near the end, when the world was undergoing colossal political and industrial changes––much of which was driven by the evolution/modernization of printing. They used the technology to their benefit. Books became a commodity of the masses.
More on Byron:
Byron’s readers and fans went too far in admiring him when they took to making false books and poems (essentially, the first documented case of fan-fiction) and then published and sold them under his name. Copyright law at the time (which first was established about a century before) by the Statute of Anne in 1710) . And this, as one could imagine, ruined Byron’s already questionable reputation.
My friend, Ghislaine, makes the point that the same republican tendency that started the French revolution was the same that created the democratization of readership, and hence the literary mob/cult following of Byron. In his forming of a never-before-seen huge democratic readership, Byron eventually was overthrown by his fans.
MORE TO COME THIS WEEKEND! YAY.
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