Real Lives, Celebrity Stories: Narratives of Ordinary and Extraordinary People Across Media

233 Pages·2014·1.86 MB·English

by  Julia Round

Real Lives, Celebrity Stories

Real Lives, Celebrity Stories
Narratives of Ordinary and
Extraordinary People across Media
Edited by
Bronwen Thomas and Julia Round
NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 2014
© Bronwen Thomas and Julia Round, 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or
refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury or the editors.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-0238-6
ePDF: 978-1-4411-4618-2
ePub: 978-1-4411-9715-3
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Contents
Introduction Bronwen Thomas and Julia Round 1
Part 1 Stories We Live By 11
1 Storying Cyberspace: Narratives and Metaphors Sue Thomas 13
2 Me and You and Everyone We Know: The Centrality of Character in
Understanding Media Texts Craig Batty   35
Part 2 Transforming the Ordinary/Everyday 57
3 The Good, the Bad and the Healthy: The Transforming Body and
Narratives of Health and Beauty in Reality TV Peri Bradley 59
4 Competence in Your Own Enactment: Subjectivity
and the Theorization of Participatory Art Simon Grennan 79
5 The Transformations of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor:
“Ordinary Life Is Pretty Complex Stuff” Julia Round 95
Part 3 The Politics of Representing Real People 111
6 Narratives of Trauma Re-lived: The Ethnographer’s Paradox
and Other Tales Marina Lambrou 113
7 Autobiography and Political Marketing: Narrative
and the Obama Brand Darren G. Lilleker 129
8 Merging Fact and Fiction: Cult Celebrity, Film Narrative
and the Henry Lee Lucas Story Shaun Kimber 151
Part 4 Celebrity Lives Reimagined 169
9 Fans Behaving Badly? Real Person Fic and the Blurring of the
Boundaries between the Public and the Private Bronwen Thomas 171
10 Remembering Frank Sinatra: Celebrity Studies Meets Memory
Studies Roberta Pearson 187
Notes on Contributors 210
Index 213

Introduction
Bronwen Thomas and Julia Round
Bournemouth University, UK
While it has long been recognized that narrativizing or storying the self has
become a major preoccupation of contemporary culture, very little attention has
been paid thus far to the precise forms these narratives take, or to considering
their impact across media. Most studies of the representation of “real lives”
or “celebrity culture” tend to be media-specific, for example focusing on
the Hollywood star system, or the emergence and prevalence of reality TV.
Moreover, few studies to date look at real people in the media and celebrities
alongside one another, when as this volume demonstrates, they are increasingly
interconnected and interdependent.
This volume adopts a new approach, offering case studies from across a
wide range of media, and drawing on narrative and linguistic theory, as well
as on theories and models derived from media, film, and cultural studies. The
volume also includes reflections from researchers working directly with real-
life stories (Lambrou) and from practitioners whose job it is to script, direct,
and produce the “real” (Batty). Some of the chapters (e.g., Batty, Bradley, and
Kimber) deal with how the presentation of the self depends on the repetition of
narrative structures that come to seem natural or obvious to us, whereas other
chapters (Lambrou, Pearson, and Bronwen Thomas) explore how audiences
and “ordinary people” respond to, are affected by, but also help co-create the
stories they encounter. The volume also addresses the responsibilities that come
with storytelling in the context of representing “real lives,” and the ethical and
political issues resulting from the attempt to impose structure, perspective,
and meaning on events and individuals that may defy comprehension (see,
e.g., Lambrou and Kimber). The chapters in this volume also consider the
transformative potential of narrative, helping foreground and celebrate the
everyday and the quotidian (Bradley, Round, and Grennan), and to provide
2 Real Lives, Celebrity Stories
individuals with a language or “script” that helps them deal with the new and
the perplexing (Sue Thomas, Batty).
One of the objectives of the volume is to try and dispel the sense of mutual
suspicion that still divides narrative theory from media and cultural studies.
Narrative theorists often accuse media and cultural studies of “text blindness”
(Hauksen 2004), eschewing any kind of textual analysis or attention to form,
and also refusing to make any kind of evaluative judgment about aesthetic value.
Meanwhile, media theorists are rightly critical of classical narratology and its
formalist preoccupation with “text.” In this context, postclassical narratology has
shown a willingness to engage with narrative affect and emotion, drawing on
work in the cognitive sciences to explore how theory of mind can help us move
from text to storyworld (Herman 2002) and from close reading to understanding
narrative as an intersubjective experience (Herman 2003, Palmer 2004). Moreover,
the influence of linguistics and stylistics has seen a shift toward approaching
narrative as situated discourse, resulting in far greater attention being paid to the
social and cultural contexts in which narratives are found.
The impact of new media and digital technologies has contributed
significantly to overcoming many critical and conceptual divisions, and to
eroding the notion of fixed boundaries between disciplines, but also between
fundamental categories such as fiction/nonfiction, author/reader, and self/
other. Excited by the possibilities that digital technologies have presented
for storytelling, postclassical narratology (e.g., Ryan 2004) has revisited its
structuralist roots to argue that it is uniquely placed to explore narrative
structures across media, and to demonstrate how narrativization is embedded
even in the most seemingly factual of discourses. Contemporary narrative
theory also increasingly responds to the affordances of emerging new media,
particularly as a means of gaining greater awareness and understanding of the
role of the reader/audiences, and of accessing narratives that once would only
have been available orally to a small or restricted group of people. Transmedia
storytelling offers audiences the opportunity to engage with a text in various
forms according to their own preferences. The text(s) thus becomes a unique
experience that varies from person to person, demonstrating the importance
of considering narrative structure alongside audience demand and response.
In grander terms, the move from localized storytelling to broadcasting back to
narrowcasting demonstrates the mobility and multiplicity of today’s audience(s)
and their effect on the texts they consume; these are considerations that this
collection aims to incorporate into its discussion.
Introduction 3
The medium of the text is also increasingly a consideration, regarding
audience, structure, and content. In this regard, new media have taken traditional
means of representation in exciting directions. The possibilities for representing
the self visually have long been a subject of fascination in multiple genres of
high and low art. From the self-portrait to the mise en scène, visual means of
representing experience have problematized and interrogated the notion of one’s
self and one’s story. The use of iconic celebrity images in high art (such as the
work of Andy Warhol) or the appearance of celebrity figures in comics (see,
e.g., Shirley 2005) can take multiple forms, from the subversive to the idealized,
and a divide between person and persona is often exploited. Conversely, the
rise of autobiography in visual narratives such as comics has demonstrated
that a fascination with telling one’s own story and engaging with issues of the
“everyday” crosses media and genre. Originally a staple of British and American
underground “comix”, autobiography has risen to become a central theme in
these countries’ mainstream comics today. Some of the earliest comics criticism
(Eisner 1985, McCloud 1993) discusses the impact of caricature and recognition
on reader identity. Film adaptations of titles such as Persepolis (2007) or American
Splendor (2003) have further extended the reach of diverse visual methods of
storying the self within a wider cross-feed of ideas across media, including fine
art and performance spaces.
Both “old” and “new” media present us with endless tales of “People Like Us”
and the fantasy that sharing your story with millions of others can be rewarding
and transformative, bringing instant celebrity and validation. Contemporary
representations of reality such as those that have come to define MTV perform
an important function, especially for young Millennials, providing them with
a kind of “identity workbook” (Klein 2013) through which they may generate
and negotiate their sense of their place in the world. The digital revolution has
prompted much theorizing about the ways in which identity and a sense of self
are created through narrative, and the extent to which new media forms may
allow individuals to play out versions of themselves, to create a “second self”
(Turkle 2005) and gain a sense of empowerment. However, there has also been
condemnation and criticism of the potential for exploitation that these seeming
freedoms may bring, creating a “freakshow” (Dovey 2000) mentality in which
often vulnerable individuals may be encouraged to expose themselves to ridicule.
The impact of digital technologies and the rise of reality TV have also led
theorists to revisit and question the idea of celebrity itself. Instant and “micro”
celebrities have emerged from social media, whereas “structured reality” shows