Document Type
Introduction
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Since the publication of Richard Dyer’s Stars several decades ago, the academic study of stardom has become a dynamic area of analysis within media studies, with several recent developments in celebrity studies – now a distinct scholarly field – establishing a discursive framework for this special issue of Reconstruction. For example, the spring 2010 special issue of the journal The Velvet Light Trap (no. 65), Celebrity!, provided an occasion to showcase theoretical developments in the field, including Barry King’s Marxist analysis of the circulation of the celebrity as a transnational brand in “Stardom, Celebrity, and the Money Form,” and to analyze recent events in celebrity culture through a series of brief “snapshots.” The recently introduced Routledge journal Celebrity Studies captures the spirit of that special issue by not only documenting and challenging the development of celebrity studies as a field (in all of its disciplinary and interdisciplinary formations) but also inviting scholars to contribute “timely, provocative and open-ended short pieces on current topics in celebrity studies,” seeking to produce a vibrant discourse that attends to the emerging events and trends in celebrity culture. The most recent addition to this surge of scholarship on celebrity culture within academic journals is the October 2011 issue of the PMLA (Vol. 126, No. 4) devoted to the special topic “Celebrity, Fame, Notoriety.” The issue features both a series of theoretical reflections from established voices within celebrity studies (including Joshua Gamson, Leo Braudy, and Marjorie Garber) and articles that examine stardom through a diverse range of textual encounters, from Oscar Wilde’s Salome to Audrey Tautou’s face. In this special issue, we seek to build on these recent contributions to celebrity studies by exploring the cultural, political, and institutional significance of stardom in relation to location, expanding on what King termed the “poetics of marketability” to examine the poetics of circulation produced by celebrity culture.
Repository Citation
Patti, Lisa, and Stanka Radović. "Editors’ Introduction: The Locations of Stardom." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 12, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–4. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol12/iss1/1