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The last decade has seen the rise of a new trinity of supermodels, the so-called Insta-girls, Kendall Jenner, Gigi, and Bella Hadid. Besides mastering the art of digital self-promotion, they belong to famous Californian families with strong ties to show business. Their impressive climb to the top has made them the most followed and paid models in the fashion industry. Nevertheless, their role in contemporary visual and celebrity culture has been scarcely inquired about by academics. The aim of this thesis is to explore through a critical visual analysis of their representations how and if the newfound role of social media as a source of stardom is challenging established myths of celebrity and ingrained high fashion beauty ideals. Firstly, through the use of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the ‘Field’ and Olivier Driessens’ schema of ‘Celebritization’, it is analyzed how the Insta-girls have designed their personas, their public mask, mimicking previous templates of the fashion modeling field. Secondly, through the lenses of Sandra Lee Bartky and Susan Bordo, two feminist theorists who have assessed and discussed how women regulate and discipline their bodies, this thesis shows how the Insta-girls, despite their celebrity status, have been scrutinized according to the rigid body standards required of fashion models.

This dissertation is a three-pronged study examining American themes, celebrity, and collective identity associated with the television program American Idol. The study includes discourse analyses of the first seven seasons of the program, of the season seven official American Idol message boards, and of the 2002 and 2008 show press coverage. The American themes included a rags-to-riches narrative, archetypes, and celebrity. The discourse-formed archetypes indicate which archetypes people of varied races may inhabit, who may be sexual, and what kinds of sexuality are permitted. On the show emotional exhibitions, archetypal resonance, and talent create a seemingly authentic celebrity while discourse positioning confirms this celebrity. The show also fostered a complication-free national American collective identity through the show discourse, while the online message boards facilitated the formation of two types of collective identities: a large group of American Idol fans and smaller contestant-affiliated fan groups. Finally, the press coverage study found two overtones present in the 2002 coverage, derision and awe, which were absent in the 2008 coverage. The primary reasons for this absence may be reluctance to criticize an immensely popular show and that the American Idol success was no longer surprising by 2008. By 2008, American Idol was so ingrained within American culture that to deride it was to critique America itself. In sum, the findings were that American Idol presents an ideal version of American culture, where gender, race, and class issues are non-existent, power is shared democratically, the American national identity is fair, generous, familial, and celebrity and success are easily attainable. This idealization of contemporary American culture functions to sustain the current status quo of economic and cultural standards. / Mass Media and Communication

This dissertation investigates how and why contemporary canonical authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie incorporate their celebrity and canonical status as authors into the fictional worlds of their novels. The contemporary celebrity author in general is at the mercy of a more globalized publication industry that depends on a circuit of international circulation, translation, and the diverse reactions of a transnational readership. More specifically, each of the authors I focus on in this dissertation have become notorious, both for their professional literary achievements as well as various political or sexual scandals running alongside their publication history. The decentralization of the author’s power to control his own image as it becomes stratified across a multiplicity of competing discourses, audiences, and marketplaces is spurred on by a literary marketplace that favors world literature, international circulation, and the whims of readership response. Thus, the need to revise or challenge the public perception of their authorship is constantly at stake for these figures – so much so that they introduce doppelgänger versions of themselves into their fiction to negotiate this relationship. I argue that the hybrid-generic form of autobiographical-metafiction allows these authors to integrate this struggle for authority over their own authorship into both the form and content of their fictional worlds. Ultimately, the project of tracing different iterations of the doppelgänger novelist across national and historical markers helps us formulate a contemporary theory of authorship that asserts how the “author” must always operate in a liminal space between the constructed fictional world and the real historical world. / English