User:DeRossitt/Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity

Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity is a 2011 book by literary scholar Jonathan Goldman. In the book, he argues that the modernist movement in twentieth-century literature is best understood as part of the popular phenomenon of celebrity.

Overview
Introduction: Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity

Chapter 1: Oscar Wilde, Fashioning Fame

Chapter 2: James Joyce and Modernist Exceptionalism

Chapter 3: Gertrude Stein: Everybody's Celebrity

Chapter 4: Charlie Chaplin, Author of Modernist Celebrity

Chapter 5: Rhys, the Obscure: The Literature of Celebrity at the Margins

Epilogue: "Everybody Who Was Anybody Was There": After Modernism, After Celebrity, John Dos Passos

Reception
Patrick Mullen, reviewing the book in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, praised the book as "a welcome addition to the scholarship on modernism and its complicated relationships with popular culture." Calling Goldman's argument "compelling," Mullen nevertheless found Goldman's discussion of James Joyce "too one dimensional":

"Perhaps I am speaking more as a fan than a critic, but Joyce seems more complex to me than this definitive statement would allow. This limitation—the reduction of the complex interplay of celebrity discourse and the stylistic experimentation of modernism to the imprimatur of exceptionalism—to a certain extent marks the entire study."

In the Journal of Modern Literature, Carey James Mickalites wrote,

Jonathan Goldman’s Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity makes a sophisticated and compelling contribution both to the growing field of celebrity studies and to modernist criticism. The book builds on and argues with several recent materialist approaches to modernist cultural production.... Where Goldman diverges from these approaches, and where he signals his own original and exciting contribution, is in his attention to the aesthetic practices internal to modernist texts and how they share a logic with the market in celebrity-making.

Citing Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity in a study of cartoons in the 1930's issues of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Esquire magazines, Leslie Newton praised Jonathan Goldman for "significantly contribut[ing] to the nature of the modernist celebrity within the context of self-promotion from the position of authorship in terms of reputation, signatures, and imprimaturs."

Cynthia Port, writing in the Edith Wharton Review, applauded Goldman for his "compelling analyses of how some modernists manipulated the phenomenon of celebrity to reinforce rather than undermine their culturally-elevated status."