Chumley, L. & Robles-Anderson, E.

Fall 2015

FAME

Course Description:

Fame—celebrity, notoriety, renown—confers both recognition and immortality. It is the most

enduring and desirable form of social power; a uniquely human ambition and a central force in
social life. Culture, commerce, politics, and religion all proffer promises of fame, whether for
fifteen minutes or fifteen centuries. Drawing on texts from history, anthropology, sociology,
literature, philosophy, and contemporary media, this course will reflect on the ethics, erotics,
pragmatics and pathologies of fame. We will compare fame to other forms of recognition
(reputation, honor, charisma, infamy, etc.), and look at how fame operates in various social
and historical circumstances, from small agricultural communities to enormous, hyper-
mediated societies such as our own. How does the fame of the oral epic differ from the fame
of the printed book or the fame of the photograph? We’ll consider the enduring question of
fame as it transforms across space, time, social boundaries, and technological conditions.

Course Information:

Instructors: Lily Chumley Erica Robles-Anderson

chumley@nyu.edu erica.robles@nyu.edu
Office Hours: Fridays @11am Wednesday@3pm
239 Greene, Rm 710 239 Greene, Rm 717

Learning Objectives:

This class has three goals.

(1) Students will learn to identify and contrast models of fame as forms of social power in
terms of concepts such as charisma, embodiment, intersubjective space-time,

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semiotics of brand, person-construction, and varieties of mediation, both textual and

technological.
(2) Students will learn to analyze particular cases—leaders, champions, prophets,
celebrities, and villains—in terms of these models.
(3) Students will explore at least one research method commonly used in the humanities
and social sciences (e.g. archival research, observation, interviews, discourse analysis,
etc.) We will discuss methods as we work through readings from different disciplines
over the semester. Students will then employ one or more methods in their final
projects.

Expectations and Assessment:

(1) Opening the text (20%) Each class meeting will be focused on close reading and
discussions of one or more texts. Each student will be responsible for “opening a text” (or
part of a text) once during the semester. On that day, the discussion leader will produce a
two-page paper (one double-side sheet) with an analysis of the key concepts in the text—
bring 52 paper copies for the entire class and the professors, and post a digital version to
the website.
(2) Note-taking (20%) Each class meeting will have 3-5 designated note-takers who will be
responsible for documenting the conversation, so that others can put their full energy
into the discussion. Each student will be a designated note-taker four times (each time
worth 5% of grade). Your notes must be thorough and clear and should be uploaded to
the class website (scanned legible handwriting or type) within 24 hours after the class.
(3) Engaged participation (10%). Although this is a large class, it is not a lecture format. In our
discussions, we will be looking for knowledge-building contributions that demonstrate
active thought and sustained focus, and which contribute to your peers’ understandings.
(4) Midterm (20%). Midway through the class you will be asked to synthesize our work thus
far in the form of an in-class essay and quiz.
(5) Final Project and presentation (30%) The final leg of this course will require you to work
through an original analysis of a contemporary or historical situation of fame. This is an
opportunity to apply the critical skills and material covered in the class as well as to have
some fun, to create and express and do it with academic rigor and gusto. Towards the
end of the semester we will spend our class time discussing research methods and
resources; students should be conducting intensive research at this time. In the last two
weeks of the course students will form small groups based on their final project topics,
and each group will present their findings to the class (10% of students’ grade). The final
paper (15-18 pages including notes and references), due after presentations to give you
time to adjust your argument in light of feedback on the presentation, will be due 12/21
and will be worth 20% of grade.

CLASS RULES:
1. Do the reading, for everyone’s sake. Class meetings center on in-depth discussion of
concepts from the texts. Weekly meetings are our opportunity to work through texts as

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a community and the prerequisite for high-quality discussion is that everyone reads the
material ahead of time.
2. Be Here Now. If you use the internet in class, you will be marked absent. Discussion
leaders will be handing out discussion topics, and note-takers will be responsible for
notes, so put your device away and join the discussion.
3. Give credit where credit is due. Cite your sources. As members of the Steinhardt
community you are expected to uphold the standards of Academic Integrity
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/policies/academic_integrity. Failure to do so will result in an
automatic failure on the assignment and harsher actions, if warranted.
4. Seek the help you need to improve your work. Come to office hours to ask us
questions. Ask a classmate to give feedback on your work. Go to the writing center to
polish your prose. Students with special needs should be in contact with us at the
beginning of the semester so that we can insure accommodations. If appropriate
students should register with the Moses Center for Students with Disabilities at 212-
998-4980, 240 Greene Street, http://www.nyu.edu/csd.

Required Texts:

There are five books that we are asking you to purchase for this course:

 The Iliad, Homer. (Trans: R. Lattimore & R. Martin): University of Chicago.

 The Aeneid, Virgil. (Trans: R. Fagles): Penguin Classics.
 The Age of Alexander, Plutarch. (Trans: I. Scott-Kilvert): Penguin Classics.
 Sophocles I: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Sophocles. (Trans: D.
Grene & R. Lattimore): University of Chicago.
 Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People 1936 (any edition)

All are available at the campus bookstore or from your friendly local or online book purveyor.
All other texts are available on the NYU Classes site for this course or in the public domain.

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I- What is it to be known?

Week 1: Introduction
9/2 Introductory lecture

Week 2: Fama: ephemeral immortality

9/9 William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
Gay Talese, “The silent hero of a season”, in Fame and Obscurity.

Week 3: Champions and Heroes

9/14 The Iliad, Book 1, 9, 16, 17, 18, 19 (and Introduction)
9/16 The Aeneid Book I, IV, VIII (and Introduction)

Week 4: Kings and Rebels

9/21 Plutarch, “Life of Alexander”, in The Age of Alexander (and Introduction)
9/23 Egil’s Saga (passages 31, 40, 44-45, 55-56, 80) (and Introduction)

Week 5: Prophets and Mystics

9/28 The Gospel According to St. Matthew - King James Version
The Gospel of Mary (from the Nag-Hammadi Libraries)
9/30 Jonathan Spence, “Ch. 5 The Key” & “Ch. 6 Wandering”, in God’s Chinese Son: The
Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan

II- What kind of power is fame?

Week 6: The modes and moral status of exceptionalism

10/5 Max Weber, “The nature of charismatic authority and its routinization”
10/7 Max Weber, “The prophet”

Week 7: Coins in Different Realms

10/13 Hilary Mantel, “Royal Bodies”, London Review of Books Vol. 35, No. 4, 2013
Guy Trebay, “After the bust, the boom-boom room” NYT 2009
10/14 Wallace-Hadrill, “Image and Authority in the Coinage of Augustus”, The Journal of
Roman Studies Vol. 76 (1986), pp. 66-87

Week 8: The space-time of personal expansion

10/19 Nancy Munn, Ch. 1 the Conceptual Framework, Ch. 5, Fame in The Fame of Gawa: A
Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society
Video: Bitch I’m Madonna
10/21 Nakassis, Constantine, “Brands and their Surfeits”, Cultural Anthropology, 36(1).
Manning, Paul. “Semiotics of Brand,” Annual Review of Anthropology 2010

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Week 9: Midterm
10/26 Mid-term quiz
10/28 Mid-term essay

III- How is fame made?

Week 10: Media: Agents and Assistants

11/2 The Cathedral (aka Hunchback) of Notre Dame (excerpt on the replacement of
architecture by the printed word as the mode of fame)
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (excerpts)
11/4 Phineas Taylor Barnum, The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written By Himself (excerpts)
Dale Carnegie, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”

Week 11: Media: Technologies and Techniques

11/9 Walter Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”
Murray, Sue. Ch. 2 “A marriage of spectacle and intimacy”, in Hitch Your Antenna to The
Stars
11/11 Hiroki Azuma, “Chapter 2: The database”, in Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals.(Trans:
J. Abel & S. Kono.

Week 12: Infamy

11/16 Erving Goffman, “Ch. 2, Information Control and Personal Identity”, in Stigma: Notes
On The Management of Spoiled Identity
11/18 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

IV- Research

Week 13: Research Methods

11/23 Ethnographic Research Workshop
Thanksgiving Recess

Week 14: Research Methods

11/30 Archival Research Workshop
12/2 Text Analysis

Week 15: Research Presentations

12/7
12/9

Week 16: Research Presentations

12/14

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Fall 2015

Final Papers Due 12/21

Course Bibliography
Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Translated by Jonathan E. Abel and
Shion Kono. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009.
Barnum, Phineas Taylor. The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written By Himself. London:
Sampson, Low, Son & Co., 1855.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn,
Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in
The Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966.
Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1968.
Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E.
Fields. New York: Free Press, 1995.
Durkheim, Émile. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Translated by John A. Spalding and
George Simpson. New York: The Free Press, 1951.
Galison, Peter. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1997.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1959.
Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963.
Gray, Jonathan, and Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, eds. Fandom: Identities
and Communities in a Mediated World. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics, 1998.
Inglis, Fred. A Short History of Celebrity. Princeton, 2010.
Jackson, Phil. Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior. New York:
Hyperion, 1995.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New
York: Routledge, 1992
Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame and Contemporary Culture. University of
Minnesota, 1997
Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social
Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Munn, Nancy. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in Massim

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Fall 2015

(Papua New Guinea) Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Murray, Susan. Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Early Television and Broadcast
Stardom. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Scudder, Bernard, trans. Egil’s Saga. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005.
Shakespeare, William. Complete Sonnets. London: Dover, 1991.
St. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin, 1961.
Talese, Gay. Fame and Obscurity. New York: Ivy Books, 1995.
Weber, Max, Essays in Sociology. Translated and Edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright
Mills. New York: Routledge, 1948.
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone books 2002
The Gospel According to St. Matthew, King James Bible.
Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth
Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008.
Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). Harvest Books,
1977.
Yeats, William Butler. The Tower. New York: Scribner, 2003.

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