I Played Frisbee with Jesus: Media, Print and the Cult of Personality
David Finkelstein
Research Professor, Media & Print Culture
Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, Scotland
2:00-3:30 pm on Friday, February 8, 2008
Indiana University Bloomington, Herman B. Wells Library, Room LI 001
Refreshments will be available prior to the talk at 1:45 pm.
ABSTRACT
This lecture will look at Media, Print, Culture and its Commodification, exploring the ways in which creators, producers and audiences have been conjoined over the past 150 years in the production of literary culture and social meaning through printed text and other media. It will draw on multimedia techniques to analyse examples ranging from the writing of 19th century African exploration narratives to modern day media and film texts, political propaganda, sports activities and academic discourse. It will conclude by drawing attention to the ways in which concepts of ‘authorship’ and the ‘cult of personality’ have been filtered and used over the past 150 years to frame concepts of other peoples and places, to embed concepts of human selection and iconic commodification, and to sanctify commercial and colonising imperatives.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
David Finkelstein is Research Professor of Media and Print Culture at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. His research interests include media history, print culture and book history studies, and the history and cultural influence of the Edinburgh publishers William Blackwood and Sons. His publications include The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002), and the co-authored An Introduction to Book History (2005). He is editor of Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition (2006), which was awarded the Robert Colby Scholarly Book Prize for the publication in 2006 that most significantly advanced the understanding of the nineteenth-century periodical press. He has also co-edited Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (2000), Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media (2000), The Book History Reader (2001; 2nd revised edition 2006) and the Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland: vol 4: Professionalism and Diversity, 1880-2000 (2007). More information about his research interests and publications can be found at: http://www.qmu.ac.uk/mcs/mcc/staff/DavidFinkelsteinSummary.htm.
Please note that the Student Meeting, previously scheduled for 10-12 on Feb. 8th, has been canceled.
