First-Year Seminar: A Star is Born: Literature and Celebrity

It's easy to imagine literature as a hermetically-sealed art form, functioning outside, above, or beyond the petty, gossipy flows of popular culture. But the culture of celebrity has long been both a subject and spark for literary writers. This course tracks the long, intertwined history of fame and literary production from the eighteenth century to the present, Lord Byron to Kim Kardashian. We'll read novels and poems about celebrity, learn about literary celebrities both immortal and forgotten, and study the ways in which the emergence of various media (from print to photography to film and television and social media) have forced literary writers to reckon with the type of visibility that fame bestows on the famous. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.
Course Attributes: EN H; FYS; BU Hum; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM

First-Year Seminar: A Star is Born: Literature and Celebrity

ENGLISH LITERATURE 166

Section 01