Mapping the Stars: Celebrity, Metonymy, and the Networked Politics of Identity (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780814215500)

Often dismissed as trivial or even "trash," celebrity culture offers a unique way of considering what it means to be human. In Mapping the Stars, Claire Sisco King shows how close analysis of the complex and sometimes contradictory forms of celebrity culture can challenge dominant ideas about selfhood. In particular, as a formation that develops across time, mediums, and texts, celebrity is useful for demonstrating how humanness is defined by relationality, contingency, and even vulnerability.

King considers three stars with popular and controversial personas: Norman Rockwell, Will Smith, and Kim Kardashian. Working in very different contexts and with very different public images, these figures nonetheless share a consistent, if not conspicuous, interest in celebrity as a construct. Offering intertextual readings of their public images across such sites as movie posters, magazines, cinema, and social media-and deploying rhetorical theories of metonymy (a linguistic device linking signifiers by shared associations)-King argues that these stars' self-reflexive attention to the processes by which celebrity is created and constrained creates opportunities for reframing public discourse about what it means to be famous and what it means to be a person.

Author: Claire Sisco King
ISBN-10: 0814215505
ISBN-13: 9780814215500
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Language: English
Published: 07/26/2023
Pages: 264
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.22lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.75d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2024