Stars

Catalog description

January 2021: Elvis When the US Postal Service first floated the idea of an “Elvis Presley” stamp (which some detractors felt gave justification to a dissolute life), they asked patrons to vote between two images: the young rocker from the South, simple in look and garb, and the extravagant Las Vegas superstar in white sequined jumpsuit. The young Elvis won out, but the very fact that there could be such a choice catches something of the ambiguities and instabilities in the star image, especially for this iconic figure in American life. This course sets out to investigate the contradictions of media stardom as embodied in the example of Elvis Presley: the rapid ascend to fame and acclaim and the as-rapid descent into squalid tragedy; the appeal to authenticity (as in the simple guitar and un-mic’ed directness of the “Comeback special”) and the exploitation of overblown artificiality (Las Vegas); the projection of white Southern masculinity combined with a welcoming of racial diversity (for example, the influence of African American folk music traditions); likewise, a blurring of gender identities (the 50s male rocker as intensely macho yet inflected by stereotypical traits of femininity); complex and perhaps even confused standards of artistic taste (the sheer silliness or laziness of many Elvis movies in the 1960s combined with their ongoing box office success), and so on. The goal of the course is not to come up with a singular, dogmatic evaluation of Elvis’s career, across media, but to examine how he lives out the many contradictions of stardom and success idealized in stereotypes of the American dream.