Consuming objects, consuming individuals: United States literature, mass media and the construction of the modern celebrity

This dissertation examines marketing strategies that emerge in the United States in the early to mid twentieth-century, during the years of industrial capitalism, in order to posit that these developments generate the conditions of possibility necessary for the emergence of the celebrity-image. The celebrity-image is an economic and cultural effect, a new figuration of the commodity form that emerges in media intensive second stage capitalism. While the celebrity figure ostensibly remains an individual, his or her circulated image functions as a saleable product through advertisement endorsements, in media profiles and most obviously, in film and television promotion. This coalescence of the human and the commodity fully develops in the late twentieth-century as society favors and circulates idealized personalities, honoring them in lieu of those who accomplish extraordinary deeds. This project contends that early instantiations of the celebrity-image can be encountered in marketing strategies of the first half of the twentieth-century.;In order to elucidate this shifting conception of subjectivity, I draw on literary sources as well as cultural texts such as instructional manuals, advertisements, popular magazines and film. Literary works, early novels in particular, have often been credited with defining and even inventing the bourgeois individual in the eighteenth-century, so it should come as no surprise that literature articulates, codifies and resists this new mode of individuation. This project identifies how novels by Horatio Alger, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kenneth Fearing and Nathanael West represent and respond to this changed conception of subjectivity. Alongside the literary texts, each chapter investigates a particular marketing strategy---window dressing, aspirational print advertising, mass-media periodicals or the Hollywood studio system---to show how it generates consumer desire by crafting appealing narratives to attach to the product for sale. Furthermore, this project demonstrates how the construction of the celebrity as a circulating image detached from an individual and produced by a media or marketing company for the purpose of generating sales anticipates the postmodern understanding of the subject as a multi-faceted fabrication.