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A short history of celebrity
Love it or hate it, celebrity is one of the dominant features of modern life--and one of the least understood. Fred Inglis sets out to correct this problem in this entertaining and enlightening social history of modern celebrity, from eighteenth-century London to today's Hollywood. Vividly written and brimming with fascinating stories of figures whose lives mark important moments in the history of celebrity, this book explains how fame has changed over the past two-and-a-half centuries.
Starting with the first modern celebrities in mid-eighteenth-century London, including Samuel Johnson and the Prince Regent, the book traces the changing nature of celebrity and celebrities through the age of the Romantic hero, the European fin de siècle, and the Gilded Age in New York and Chicago. In the twentieth century, the book covers the Jazz Age, the rise of political celebrities such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, and the democratization of celebrity in the postwar decades, as actors, rock stars, and sports heroes became the leading celebrities.
Arguing that celebrity is a mirror reflecting some of the worst as well as some of the best aspects of modern history itself, Inglis considers how the lives of the rich and famous provide not only entertainment but also social cohesion and, like morality plays, examples of what--and what not--to do.
This book will interest anyone who is curious about the history that lies behind one of the great preoccupations of our lives.
eBook
Trademark Fame and Corpus Linguistics
Trademark law recognizes that the same word can mean different things in different commercial contexts. Legal protection might extend to two or more owners who use the same symbol (like Delta) to indicate different sources of disparate goods or services, such as airlines and faucets. Generally, only those uses that threaten to confuse consumers—the use of similar symbols on identical or related goods—are subject to legal sanction. But the law extends special protection to famous trademarks, not only against confusing use, but also against dilution: non-confusing use that blurs or tarnishes the distinctiveness of the famous mark. The result of protection against blurring is that the law treats the famous mark as if the sole proper use of the term in the commercial context is to designate goods and services from the famous mark’s owner. Protection against dilution extends only to famous marks, but courts and scholars apply differing standards for assessing fame. Nonetheless, the trend over time has been to treat fame as a threshold requiring both sufficient renown—the famous mark must be a household name—and relatively singular use. This article argues that corpus linguistic analysis can provide evidence of whether a mark is sufficiently prominent and singular to qualify for anti-dilution protection. Corpus linguistics detects language patterns and meaning from analyzing actual language use. This article draws data primarily from two large, publicly accessible databases (corpora) to investigate whether litigated trademarks are both prominent and unique. Courts and parties can consider frequency evidence to establish or refute prominence, and contextual evidence like concordance and collocation to establish relative singularity. Corpus evidence has some advantages over standard methods of assessing fame. Corpus evidence is cheaper to generate than survey evidence but may be equally probative. Corpus analysis can help right-size dilution litigation: A litigant could estimate the prominence and singularity of an allegedly famous mark using corpus evidence prior to discovery and better predict whether the mark should qualify for anti-dilution protection. Judges should be able to rely on the results of corpus analysis with reasonable confidence. Additionally, corpus evidence can show use of a mark over time, providing courts with tools to assess when a mark first became famous, a question that a survey generated for litigation cannot readily answer.
Journal Article
How to become famous : lost Einsteins, forgotten superstars, and how the Beatles came to be
\"Consider the most famous music group in history. What would the world be like if the Beatles never existed? This was the question posed by the playful, thought-provoking 2019 film Yesterday, in which a young, completely unknown singer starts performing Beatles hits to a world that has never heard them. Would the Fab Four's songs be as phenomenally popular as they are in our own Beatle-infused world? The movie asserts that they would, but is that true? Was the success of the Beatles essentially inevitable due to their amazing, matchless talent? Maybe. It's hard to imagine our world without its stars and celebrity geniuses-they become a part of our culture and history, seeming permanent and preordained. But as Harvard law professor (and passionate Beatles fan) Cass Sunstein shows in this startling book, that is far from the case. Focusing on both famous and forgotten (or simply overlooked) artists and luminaries in music, literature, business, science, politics, and other fields, he explores why some individuals become famous and others don't and offers a new understanding of the role of greatness, luck, and contingency in the achievement of fame. First, Sunstein examines recent research-on informational cascades, power laws, network effects, and group polarization-to probe the question of how people become famous. He explores what ends up in the history books, in the great religious texts, and in the literary canon-and how that changes radically over time. He delves into the rich and entertaining stories of a diverse cast of famous characters, from John Keats, William Blake, and Jane Austen to Bob Dylan, Ayn Rand, and Stan Lee-as well as John, Paul, George, and Ringo. How to Become Famous takes you on a fun, captivating, and at times profound journey that will forever change your perspective on the latest celebrity's \"fifteen minutes,\" the nature of memory, success and failure in business, and our enduring fascination with fame\"-- Provided by publisher.
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