Alana Jordan Practise SSR on David Carter's 'The Conditions of Fame'

 Secondary Source Report on David Carter’s The Conditions of Fame

By Alana Jordan

Complete citation:

Carter, David. (2015). The conditions of Fame: Literary Celebrity in Australia between the Wars. 39 (1) pp.170-187. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.39.1.170 (30/08/20)

 

Image Credit:

Key Words:

Australia, celebrity, periodicals, modernity, authorship

Brief Overview:

The book attempts to define celebrity and create the term modern celebrity.

Summary of key points:

·      Richard Schickel has dated the birth of modern celebrity the day when Pickford signed the first million dollar film contract, with Adolph Zukor on 24 June 1916 (qtd. in Turner 11). In the Triad’s words, which almost provide a definition of celebrity, Pickford was “less a person than a Personage, less an incident than an Event” (35

·      discussions of modern celebrity and literary value circulated in the very same journals, and in ways that can scarcely be described through our anachronistic taxonomies of high and low culture

·      Third, Pickford’s presence in the Triad indicates cinema’s insertion into the cultural economy as a sub-set of theatrical performance

·      Finally, the Pickford vignette provides me with a neat way of side-stepping cultural nationalist frameworks and of emphasizing the transnational links between modernity and celebrity. From a nationalist perspective, the early decades of the twentieth century represent “a scurvy period, when Australians seemed content to accept second-rateness, were deferentially imitative in most aspects of public and cultural life, and shut themselves off as best they could from the world and modern thought” (Serle 148).

 

Important Quotations:

“a scurvy period, when Australians seemed content to accept second-rateness, were deferentially imitative in most aspects of public and cultural life, and shut themselves off as best they could from the world and modern thought” (Serle 148).

 

“devoted to literary, pictorial, musical and dramatic art.”

Usefulness to our group topic or individual project:

 

This book analyses the concept of celebrity in modern times and how this definition has evolved. This could be helpful in an essay about modern literature and how the depiction of celebrities has adapted over time. This book is based around Australia and therefore, is relevant to the to this subject. The quotes and facts within this book can influence our view on celebrities and how they have been viewed throughout the years, and help determine what creates a modern celebrity.