NAME OF INSTRUCTOR            Adrienne L. McLean

DISCIPLINE AND NUMBER        FILM 3321-001

DAY AND TIME                            Tuesday, 4:30-6:45 PM

COURSE TITLE                               Stardom, Celebrity, Culture (Film in Historical Context)

SESSION                                         Spring 2010

DESCRIPTION OF COURSE

This course is an examination of the history and ideological importance of stardom and celebrity in American culture from the early twentieth century through the present.  We will focus on how the star system developed, how it intersected with and influenced other forms of mass-mediated celebrity, how and why it has changed across time.  In addition to analyzing in detail how representative stars and celebrities have been constructed in the past, we will consider how and what it is that various famous individuals continue to signify to audiences who receive or consume them in films and television shows, publicity and promotional material, magazines and photographs, tabloids, advertisements, on the Internet, and so on.  Among the theoretical questions driving the course are how stars, celebrities, and "personalities" embody and represent (or, conversely, suppress) issues of gender and sexual identity, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, scandal, transgression, politics, and power during particular times and in reaction to and interaction with particular historical and material circumstances.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies:  Film Stars and Society (Routledge, 2003).

Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (Sage, 2004; also available as an E-book through McDermott Library).

Sean Redmond and Su Holmes, eds., Stardom and Celebrity:  A Reader (Sage, 2007).

There will also be some articles or chapters on reserve, and weekly required out-of-class screenings.