Literary celebrity reconsidered

‘It is unseemly to be famous’: Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and the melodramatic dynamics of the myth of the Russian poet in Russia and the West

“…The melodramatic features of the Russian myth of the poet are reductive and one-sided, simplifying complex individuals and the cultural field they inhabited, but this hyperbole is precisely why they are memorable, possessing persistent affective power, making visible the 'moral occult'. Ohlsson et al (2014) argue that critical approaches founded on the 'death of the author' are now 'untenable', not least because of the importance of various types of witness literature and the bearing the embodied figure of the author has on their authenticity (p. 34 citing Burke 1992). In Russia, the author never disappeared from critical discourse.…”

“…This article considers the demythologizing tendency that has surfaced in post-Soviet culture in relation to Akhmatova in particular, and investigates the historical function of Russian literary celebrity (Ohlsson et al 2014, p. 3), by exploring the role that she plays in the lateand post-Soviet intelligentsia's self-mythology. Finally, in addition to the differentiations advanced by Ohlsson et al (2014), the discussion of Akhmatova and Pasternak highlights another; that of gender.…”

“…The central problems posed by the Russian historical context will be identified here through analyses of the careers of Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, two major canonical poets who survived the necropolitics of the Stalinist regime. Ohlsson et al (2014) propose three differentiations in the concept of literary celebrity. First, they suggest, a writer's cultural capital should be taken into account, noting that discussions of literary celebrity usually centre on 'quality' authors, who inhabit the most prestigious areas of the literary field (p. 36).…”

The world author in us all: conceptualising fame and agency in the global literary market

“…Yet for those of us invested in analysing the rise of world literature as both a consciously emerging field of literary activity (Apter 2013) and an economically-driven publishing phenomenon that defines the early decades of the twenty-first century (Walkowitz 2015), a conceptual and methodological approach that sets out how people relate to systemic processes at the point where they and their work begin to travel is crucial. I therefore explore how existing work in celebrity studies that sensitises us to the fundamentally collaborative nature of literary labour (York 2013, Ohlsson et al 2014 can help us give tangible form to a 'world author' figure (Braun 2015) that might restore people to literary processes, precisely through analysing how their experiences of fame and agency pass through multiple cultural locations. At the same time, I ask what the resulting 'world author function' might be able to tell us about literary celebrity.…”

‘Making it’: practitioners’ views on literary celebrity

“…Instead, following Anders Ohlsson et al (2014), our objective is to diversify literary celebrity as an object of study still further. If it is important for scholars of literary celebrity to consider the full range of genres and types of fictions produced, as well as to incorporate a view on celebrity that is both geographically and temporally far reaching (Ohlsson et al 2014), then extending our scope to include the direct insights of literary professionals in their own words emerges as a practical manoeuvre that aids the diversification of the field.…”