SSR1: Secondary Source Report on David Carter’s The Conditions of Fame By Sebastian Mauger-Hollmann

 SSR1: Secondary Source Report on David Carter’s The Conditions of Fame

By Sebastian Mauger-Hollmann

Complete citation:

Carter, D. (2015). The conditions of fame: Literary celebrity in Australia between the wars. Journal of Modern Literature, 39(1), 170. https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.39.1.170

 

Key Words: Australia, celebrity, periodicals, modernity, authorship

 

Brief Overview: David Carter’s journal article discusses the rise of cinema and radio and how that defined the celebrity.

Summary of key points:

• Richard Schickel has dated the birth of modern celebrity to the day when Pickford signed the first million dollar film contract, with Adolph Zukor on 24 June 1916. 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” (p.171).
• 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.
• Pickford’s presence in the Triad indicates cinema’s insertion into the cultural economy as a sub-set of theatrical performance.
• 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” (p.172).

Important Quotations:

“less a person than a Personage, less an incident than an Event” (p.171).

“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” (p.172).

“Rather than the last station on the line, a backwater ten years behind Europe and America as some both at the time and since have asserted, Sydney was a busy port of call in the ceaseless international ebb and flow of commerce and ideas that underpinned cosmopolitan modernity” (p.172).

Usefulness to our group topic or individual project:

The journal article is helpful to our group or individual project as it raises interesting points regarding the rise of fame and celebrities in Australia during this time period. It also makes use of examples from Australian and international magazines alike in order to compare celebrity and modernity uses, as well as the ideas behind the use of cinema and radio, and the rise of celebrities via advertisements throughout the magazines.