Celebrity Culture

2018 ◽  
pp. 123-149
Author(s):  
Peter Marks
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Unexpected Death ◽  
Margaret Thatcher ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
Public Persona ◽  
National Response

The nineties was a decade in thrall to the tremendous cultural and commercial attractions of celebrity. If, in hindsight, the seventies seem forever marked by memories of the Winter of Discontent, and the eighties by the dominating presence of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the signature cultural moment of the nineties was the extravagant national response to the unexpected death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Diana embodied the glamour, beauty and charisma associated with celebrity, and enjoyed the capacity to furnish people with dreams that took them outside their workaday existence. Diana’s alluring public persona was founded on the fabricated fairy tale princess narrative constructed for her by the Royal Family, a compliant and sometimes complicit media, and by herself. The truth was murkier and far more complex.

scholarly journals “Doing God” in Number 10: British Prime Ministers, Religion, and Political Rhetoric

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew S. Crines ◽  
Kevin Theakston
Keyword(s):  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Policy Support ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
David Cameron ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Tony Blair ◽  
Prime Ministers ◽  
Margaret Thatcher ◽  
Public Persona

AbstractThis article analyses British prime ministers' use of religious language and their own religious beliefs in their political rhetoric. This is used to justify policy, support their ideological positions, present a public persona, and cultivate their personal ethical appeal and credibility as values-driven political leaders. The focus is on the use and the nature of the religious arguments of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. As political leaders, British prime ministers are aware of the need to modify and tailor their language in response to changing audiences and contexts. “Doing God” is a difficult and risky rhetorical strategy for British prime ministers but it increasingly has the potential to yield political benefits.

The Operatics of Everyday Life, or, How Authenticity Was Defined in Late Imperial Russia

Slavic Review ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 795-818
Author(s):  
Anna Fishzon
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
Public Persona ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Fan Letters

In this article, Anna Fishzon explores how the phenomena of celebrity culture and early sound recording contributed to notions of audientic selfhood in late imperial Russia. Public discussions about celebrities like the Bol'shoi Theater bass Fedor Shaliapin helped forge understandings of sincerity and spoke to contemporary concerns regarding the relationship between fame and artifice, the public persona and the inner self. Fishzon suggests that the emergent recording industry penetrated and altered everyday emotional experience, the arena of work, and the organization of leisure, linking gramophonic discourses to celebrity culture and its rhetoric of authenticity and sincerity. In part because Russian audio magazines and gramophone manufacturers heavily promoted celebrity opera recordings, sonic fidelity was equated with the capacity of the recorded voice to convey “sincerity,” understood, in turn, as the announcement of ardent feelings. Fan letters to Shaliapin and Ivan Ershov document these new sensibilities regarding self, authenticity, desire, and emotions.

The Red Shoes: A fairy tale within a ballet within a film.

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (Suppl 1) ◽  
pp. S104-S119
Author(s):  
Diana Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale

Transformation and Education in GDR Youth Literature: A Script Theory Approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Jean E. Conacher
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
Script Theory ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Youth Literature

Youth literature within the German Democratic Republic (GDR) officially enjoyed equal status with adult literature, with authors often writing for both audiences. Such parity of esteem pre-supposed that youth literature would also adopt the cultural–political frameworks designed to nurture the establishment of socialism on German soil. In their quest to forge a legitimate national literature capable of transforming the population, politicians and writers drew repeatedly upon the cultural heritage of Weimar classicism and the Bildungsroman, Humboldtian educational traditions and Soviet-inspired models of socialist realism. Adopting a script theory approach inspired by Jean Matter Mandler, this article explores how directive cultural policies lead to the emergence of multiple scripts which inform the nature and narrative of individual works. Three broad ideological scripts within GDR youth literature are identified which underpin four distinct narrative scripts employed by individual writers to support, challenge and ultimately subvert the primacy of the Bildungsroman genre. A close reading of works by Strittmatter, Pludra, Görlich, Tetzner and Saalmann reveals further how conceptual blending with classical and fairy-tale scripts is exploited to legitimise and at times mask critique of transformation and education inside and outside the classroom and to offer young protagonists a voice often denied their readers.

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