Claims to Fame

Celebrity in Contemporary America

Joshua Gamson

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9780520914155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Moving from People magazine to publicists' offices to tours of stars' homes, Joshua Gamson investigates the larger-than-life terrain of American celebrity culture. In the first major academic work since the early 1940s to seriously analyze the meaning of fame in American life, Gamson begins with the often-heard criticisms that today's heroes have been replaced by pseudoheroes, that notoriety has become detached from merit. He draws on literary and sociological theory, as well as interviews with celebrity-industry workers, to untangle the paradoxical nature of an American popular culture that is both obsessively invested in glamour and fantasy yet also aware of celebrity's transparency and commercialism. Gamson examines the contemporary "dream machine" that publicists, tabloid newspapers, journalists, and TV interviewers use to create semi-fictional icons. He finds that celebrity watchers, for whom spotting celebrities becomes a spectator sport akin to watching football or fireworks, glean their own rewards in a game that turns as often on playing with inauthenticity as on identifying with stars. Gamson also looks at the "celebritization" of politics and the complex questions it poses regarding image and reality. He makes clear that to understand American public culture, we must understand that strange, ubiquitous phenomenon, celebrity. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
Moving from People magazine to publicists' offices to tours of stars' homes, Joshua Gamson investigates the larger-than-life terrain of American celebrity culture. In the first major academic work since the early 1940s to seriously analyze the mean

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Explaining Angelyne
• Chapter One The Great and the Gifted: Celebrity in the Early Twentieth Century
• Chapter Two The Name and the Product: Late Twentieth-Century Celebrity
• Chapter Three Industrial-Strength Celebrity
• Chapter Four The Negotiated Celebration
• Chapter Five Props, Cues, and the Advantages of Not Knowing: Audiences in the World of Celebrity Production
• Chapter Six Hunting, Sporting, and the Willing Audience: The Celebrity-Watching Tourist Circuit
• Chapter Seven Can’t Beat the Real Thing: Production Awareness and the Problem of Authenticity
• Chapter Eight Believing Games
• Conclusion: Celebrity, Democracy, Power, and Play
• Appendix: Theoretical and Methodological Notes
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index