Art and Action: The Intersections of Literary Celebrity and Politics

Art and Action: The Intersections of Literary Celebrity and Politics

In line with a long literary tradition of the artist as propagandist, who strives to appeal to the political, moral, and social conscience of his/her readership, writers have persistently crossed the divide between art and politics both in their works and in their roles as public intellectuals, cultural critics, and political activists. Moreover, established authors have, with striking regularity, taken advantage of their celebrity status in order to draw attention to specific socio-political agendas, thus demonstrating the convertibility of ‘celebrity capital’. The talks in this symposium - hosted by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities on 5 March 2016 - address the complex interplay of authorship, politics, and fame/celebrity within an Anglophone cultural context across historical periods and media, covering a broad spectrum of themes that include literary celebrity and the politics of class, gender, and race; the tension between authorial self-fashioning and media appropriation; and the dual commitment to art and action of writers in political office. Image: Hawthorne Literary Mural, Portland, Oregon, by Jane Brewster (www.janebrewster.com)

Episodes

April 3, 2016 23 mins
Matthew Lecznar assesses the fashion politics of Adichie's fiction and public discourse Matthew Lecznar (University of Sussex) identifies the politics of fashion as central to the rise of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to international prominence as a literary celebrity and public intellectual. He suggests that Adichie’s fashion and body politics function not only as media of self-promotion but must be regarded as a trans...
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Kate McLoughlin offers an intriguing case study of the gendering of writerly fame. Kate McLoughlin (University of Oxford) talks about the textual war between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn in the pages of Collier's Magazine in July 1944. The story of the magazine's editorial interventions in presenting their D-Day dispatches tells us about authority and ambition in print, how men and women correspondents were valued during Wo...
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Simon Morgan discusses the tensions within the transatlantic anti-slavery movement between literary celebrity and moral responsibility. Simon Morgan (Leeds Beckett University) examines these tensions through the contrasting cases of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe: the former trying to use his status as an ex-slave and anti-slavery orator to promote himself as an author, the latter using her status as international lit...
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Kate De Rycker demonstrates that the social role of 16th-century English writers was becoming increasingly affected by the developing concept of celebrity. By looking at the 'Marprelate Controversy', the 'paper war' between the fictional persona of the Puritan Martin Marprelate, the established Church, and later professional writers, Kate De Rycker (University of Newcastle) argues that celebrity can indeed be considered to be a dev...
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Sandra Mayer explores Disraeli's dual commitment to art and action against the background of Victorian celebrity culture. Benjamin Disraeli's papers in the Bodleian Library allow for an intriguing glimpse into the public reception of his dual role as a successful novelist and eminent statesman. Analyzing a selection of these popular responses to Disraeli's dexterous cross-field migrations, Sandra Mayer (University of Vienna/Wolfson...
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In this roundtable discussion, Caroline Davis, Olivier Driessens, and Peter D McDonald reflect on literature as a mode of public intervention. The members of this expert panel, chaired by Elleke Boehmer, explore the socio-political dimension of literary production and launch a plea for institutional readings of literature that acknowledge the crucial gatekeeping role of publishers, literary agents, critics, and prize-giving bodies....
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