The modernist author in the age of celebrity (Ireland, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Charlie Chaplin)

This dissertation investigates the histories of literary modernism and early twentieth-century celebrity to demonstrate that these two supposedly separate spheres of culture are mutually constituitive. Anglo-American modernism creates a figure of the author that participates in and revises the phenomenon of celebrity. The texts that have come to define elite culture create an objectified, larger-than-life individual, a choreographer of disparate discourses and repository of encoded meaning, making this unique personality available to popular culture. Readings of both sides of the so-called great divide of high and low culture---Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Charlie Chaplin---show how the signature styles of modernism and celebrity produce similar forms of cultural value.; Chapter 1 begins at the end of the Victorian era and posits Wilde as the originator of twentieth-century celebrity. Wilde's 1882 lecture tour and The Picture of Dorian Gray illustrate how he fashions an image to circulate on the market, a celebrity sign that functions like a commodity. Later, in De Profundis, Wilde rejects the visual form of celebrity yet retains its logic, replacing the image with writing as the location of the subject. Chapters 2 and 3 argue that modernist technique follows Wilde's model, using idiosyncrasies of style to produce a subject situated within the text, gaining value only through circulation. Ulysses creates an author who is both the novel's origin and the final determination of its meaning, subjugating all possible interpretation of the text to Joyce's intentions. Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas turns the celebrity name into an object, a signifier within a differential system of names, making value depend entirely on the accumulation of signs that circulate around her personality. The final chapter shows Chaplin's Modern Times re-introducing visuality to modernist methods of author production, using the celebrity image to make legible the mass audience, thus legitimating the image as iconic for an historical moment. Reading Chaplin alongside modernism reveals how the logic of celebrity creates an idealized, objectified subject that cannot be subsumed by mass culture, and ultimately shows that modernist literature is very much the literature of celebrity.