The Drama of Celebrity by Sharon Marcus

Abstract

MLR, .,   Poland in an attempt to learn their family’s history without going to Auschwitz itself. Good work, Ewa! U  M S T e Drama of Celebrity. By S M. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. .  pp.;  b/w illustrations. $.; £. ISBN –––– (ebk –––-). In one of the most widely researched and acutely conceptualized books that I have had the pleasure to read in recent years, Columbia’s Sharon Marcus rewrites the history of the modern phenomenon of celebrity as it has developed over the past two hundred years. Ranging across times and places in remarkable fashion, and appropriately illustrated by over one hundred black-and-white images, e Drama of Celebrity refuses to reduce its explanation of the fame game to a single privileged source. Instead, it keeps in play—in an intellectually exhilarating fashion—the triangular geometry of celebrities, media, and publics (also in the plural), who are all shown to contribute to the perpetual reshaping of the particular instances of this phenomenon in the ‘suspenseful, interactive, serial drama’ (p. ) of the book’s title. As such, Marcus nuances a commonly held view that celebrity is created by media, which she traces back to Daniel Boorstin’s  study, e Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (London: Vintage), noting on her opening page that ‘many people still cast stars as deceptive effects of a sinister, monolithic, and all-powerful cause: the media’ (p. ). As she continues: ‘e notion that celebrities are famous merely for being famous persists to this day, appealing to laudable desires to resist authority and unmask falsehood’ (p. ). Although she is too polite to say it, this is also a notion that informs a sizeable chunk of our teaching about culture’s relationship to power. Marcus does not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Hence she brings back into play the agency and subjecthood of stars (referencing Taylor Swi’s  Tumblr post ‘We don’t ask you for free iPhones’, which forced Apple to pay royalties to artists) and fans (not least through richly original archival work on their scrapbooks), while retaining an informed sense of the ideological and technological power of the media. In this version, the media are powerful, but not all-powerful, and ‘we can opt out’; as Marcus points out, ‘No one ever did time for ignoring One Direction or not liking Miley Cyrus’ (p. ). Intriguingly, she deconstructs the largely negative scholarly take on celebrity as media manipulation by historicizing the origins of that scholarly discourse in ‘the first serious analyses of celebrity in the s and s’, whose reference points were ‘the authoritarian Hollywood studio system and the [. . .] personality cults formed around Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini’ (p. ). Although e Drama of Celebrity bears witness to historical change, its author is unusually, and refreshingly, keen to stress continuities, perhaps because she herself is already something of an academic star, as one of our best literary and cultural historians, and does not feel the need to make a splash by overdramatizing the  Reviews diachronic process. And it is her sense of the past that gives genuine weight to her reading of the present. For in each of the eight chapters (from ‘Defiance’, via ‘Sensation’, ‘Savagery’, ‘Intimacy’, ‘Multiplication’, and ‘Imitation’, through to ‘Judgment’ and ‘Merit’), the book’s central figure, Sarah Bernhardt, returns as ‘the godmother of modern celebrity culture’ (p. ). Indeed, the authority and acumen with which Marcus traces the roots of modern celebrity back to the nineteenth century are not surprising when one recalls her previous scholarship on English and French culture of that period in her two monographs: first, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), and then Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). e audience for her latest book deserves to be yet wider still. U  C N W Character as Form. By A K with illustrations by D S. London and New York: Bloomsbury. . vi+ pp. £.. ISBN ––– –. Character as Form is no conventional academic book. Punctuated with small illustrations by artist David Scher, and divided into sections with quirky subheadings such as ‘Another way to use this...