From celebrity book clubs (Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, Dua Lipa, Emma Watson, etc.) to Sarah Jessica Parker’s role as judge of the prestigious Booker Prize 2025, celebrities have been shaping the contemporary literary field in unprecedented ways. What is ‘celebrity book culture’? For an undergraduate group, this seminar starts with book studies basics and then adds concepts, terms, and ideas suggested by e. g. (cultural) sociologists Pierre Bourdieu, Clayton Childress, and James F. English into the mix, alongside recent work by scholars such as Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, Danielle Fuller, and Alexander Starre. We will study ‘celebrity book culture’ alongside the books that celebrities have championed as gatekeepers of contemporary reading culture. We will pay particular attention to R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface.

Kurs im HIS-LSF