Celebrity and Power
Fame and Contemporary Culture
Looks at the reasons why our society is fascinated with stars.
Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, stars represent not only the embodiment of success, but also the ultimate construction of false value. Celebrity and Power examines this dynamic, questioning the cultural forces behind our need to become endlessly embroiled with the construction and collapse of celebrities. “Marshall has provided an extremely useful and original study of the nature of stardom in the contemporary Western world. Locating the celebrity in a theoretical and historical context, Marshall gives us not only an analysis of the significance of this social position, but a set of tools for analyzing the different forms that it may take.” --Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Marshall’s book offers a scholarly review of critical thinking about celebrity, an original attempt to theorise its function and significance, and a perceptive comment on current trends in contemporary culture. It is a thorough, intelligent and useful contribution to an important subject.
American Studies
The celebrity is an ambiguous figure in contemporary culture. Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, stars represent not only the embodiment of success, but also the ultimate construction of false value. They are a peculiar form of public subjectivity that negotiates the tension between a democratic culture of access and a consumer capitalist culture of excess. Celebrity and Power examines this dynamic, questioning the cultural forces behind our need to become endlessly embroiled with the construction and collapse of celebrities.
Through detailed analysis of figures from Tom Cruise to Oprah Winfrey to the commercial pop music sensation New Kids on the Block, author and cultural critic P. David Marshall investigates the general public’s desire to associate with celebrity. He examines various kinds of stars, questioning the needs each type fulfills in our lives and relating these needs to particular entertainment media. Marshall asks why enigmatic, distant stars populate the silver screen while television constructs approachable “everyman” figures and popular music features audience-identified celebrity personalities. He looks at the significance of stars who amass cultlike followings as well as those who appear to prompt outright rejection.
Celebrity and Power identifies the forces that have enveloped the development of democratic culture and their partial resolution through a redefined public sphere populated by celebrities. Marshall argues that the new concern with the masses that characterizes modern capitalism promotes figures who can be seen as part of the crowd but who are articulated as individuals. As such, they provide a model of self-differentiation that furthers an economy in which product consumption is thought to bestow individualism and personality.
Bridging the fields of media studies, film studies, communications, and popular culture, Marshall’s volume is a unique resource for students and researchers in all of these disciplines as well as for the general reader.
Awards
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Marshall’s book offers a scholarly review of critical thinking about celebrity, an original attempt to theorise its function and significance, and a perceptive comment on current trends in contemporary culture. It is a thorough, intelligent and useful contribution to an important subject.
American Studies
Marshall deserves high praise for his skillful handling of the topic from the viewpoints of a wide variety of scholarly disciplines-sociology, political science, psychology, semiotics, linguistics, cinema studies, and cultural studies.
Choice
David Marshall, rather than dismissing celebrities as lightweight entertainment, smartly demonstrates the ideological work performed by the famous among us. Deftly linking film, literary, psychoanalytic, and social theory to particular case studies-Freud, Baudrillard, and Weber meet Tom Cruise, New Kids on the Block, and Oprah-Marshall offers a provocative rethinking of the power of celebrity.
Joshua Gamson, Yale University
Marshall has provided an extremely useful and original study of the nature of stardom in the contemporary Western world. Locating the celebrity in a theoretical and historical context, Marshall gives us not only an analysis of the significance of this social position, but a set of tools for analyzing the different forms that it may take. Most importantly, and unlike other studies of the star, he describes the general structure of power in which the celebrity is implicated, and consequently he is able to bring together the realms of entertainment and government. This is an important contribution to our attempts to understand the ways media function in current relations of power.
Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Contemporary celebrities, especially those in the entertainment industry, often wield significant power outside their areas of talent and expertise. How they derive and exercise their status and power is the subject of this intriguing study. Marshall deserves high praise for his skillful handling of the topic from the viewpoints of a wide variety of scholarly disciplines-sociology, political science, psychology, semiotics, linguistics, cinema studies, and cultural studies. . . . Intriguing also is Marshall’s claim that contemporary politicians are using these three modes of celebrity status to construct their own political identities. Recommended for both public and academic libraries collecting in media and cultural studies.
Choice
Thoughtful and solidly academic. . . . With this book, Marshall provides a workable schema with which to view the creation and sustainability of celebrity in western (specifically American) culture….Marshall provides a number of intriguing ideas and tools for cultural critics to use when approaching the concept of celebrity.
Literature and Psychology
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