Assignment 2
Public Figure Analysis: The Social Image
length: 4-5 pages (by which I mean: go on to the fifth page)
due dates: 7.15 (topic/proposal), 7.17 (draft), 7.18 (final)
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A public figure has a kind (or degree) of rhetorical force to which the rest of us don’t typically have access. When someone becomes a “star” or a “celebrity” or a “public figure,” part of what that means is that their persona, their actions, their words take on greater rhetorical power; intentionally or otherwise, such a person has more power to shape the culture around them. In particular, when people live a significant portion of their lives in the public sphere (touring, starring in films, playing in nationally televised sporting events, giving speeches before large audiences, etc.), they begin to function not merely as people or actors or athletes or politicians but as images. It starts making sense to speak of things like image management and image consultants; image is precisely what such a public figure has to manage in a way that most of the rest of us usually don’t have to worry too much about. A celebrity’s image becomes, at a certain point, almost independent of the person him- or herself; it may matter little at this point what Mel Gibson or Michael Jordan or Lindsay Lohan do, compared to how their brands (Mel Gibson™, Michael Jordan™, Lindsay Lohan™) function rhetorically. Either way, the person and that person’s public image are rarely the same thing—and here, your focus is on the latter. These are people whose public images have come to be significantly more important and more culturally resonant than the people themselves.
In this second assignment, I want you to choose a public figure and think about that public figure’s presence, about his or her rhetorical force in society, about how he or she functions as an image and what rhetorical effects that celebrity-image has. How is this person popularly thought of? As a hero? A villain? Both? Do different audiences feel differently (chances are, the answer is yes)? To what audience is this person a celebrity? Who’s likely to know/not know about this person? Did he/she become famous through traditional media venues (print, television, radio), or through online venues? Is this person viewed as lucky and maybe undeserving of fame, or legitimately hard-working? For what did this person become famous? What does his or her fame say about the things we value culturally? How has this person used his or her fame? To what ends? What values does this person promote or embody, deliberately or unintentionally? What broader cultural attitudes are revealed by the way this person is seen in the public eye? (Most celebrities are celebrated in some quarters and vilified in others; both of these reactions can illustrate very important—and sometimes very different—cultural attitudes.) How is culture different because of the publicly visible presence of this person? What has the person’s name and image come to evoke or signify? What do we think of when we hear this person’s name or see them on the news? Does this person actively cultivate some particular kind of public image? Have they “branded” themselves, as it were? Do they seem to embrace being in the public eye, or hide from it? Do they seem to be more or less in control of their public image, or has their image escaped their grasp? What cultural needs or desires made this person’s celebrity/public figure status possible?
What I’m not looking for here is a biography or a judgment of a person. What I am looking for is a rhetorical analysis of the public image of some public figure. If what separates public figures/celebrities from everyone else is that they have a kind of rhetorical presence that the rest of us tend not to have, what can you say about this particular public figure’s rhetorical presence? This doesn’t mean that specific events in this person’s history aren’t relevant, but they should be events that are specifically relevant to the shaping or reshaping of the person’s public image (Angelina Jolie’s double mastectomy, Tiger Woods’s infidelity, Britney Spears shaving her head), and should be analyzed as such.
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It may be useful to view this as sort of a two-step process (though your paper certainly doesn’t have to be structured this way): first, to articulate both the general sense and the specific details of your public figure’s public image; and second, to unpack the rhetorical effects of that public image within whatever culture or cultures it circulates through (so if you’re analyzing a Penn State celebrity, think about the effects of that celebrity’s image within Penn State, within the broader State College community, within the state of Pennsylvania, etc.). This loosely maps on to the first assignment, where you were tasked with both visual analysis (describing and analyzing the specific visual/aesthetic/structural features of the image) and rhetorical analysis (articulating the rhetorical effects of those features and of the image as a whole). Here, instead of analyzing a literal image, you are thinking of a public figure as a kind of image and then thinking about how that image operates rhetorically. Beyond that, though, it should feel like a similar operation to the first paper.
As with the previous paper, it’s good to have a sense here of larger context. What does Tom Cruise’s public image tell us about cultural attitudes towards masculinity, or towards romantic love (Tom Cruise jumping around on Oprah’s couch), or towards non-mainstream religious beliefs? What does Aaron Hernandez’s public image show us about how we think about the relationship between sports and crime? What does Lady Gaga’s fandom reveal about contemporary attitudes towards art and commerce, or about the relationship between female sexuality and commodification, or about social media? What does Sarah Palin illustrate about contemporary politics, or Steve Jobs about technology and commerce and innovation, or Serena Williams about the intersection between race, gender, and professional sports? In other words, as with the first paper, your specific analysis of one particular image (in this case, celebrity-as-image) should hook up interestingly to broader issues—chances are the public figure you chose wouldn’t be hugely interesting if not for these kinds of larger implications
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Due: Thursday night, 7.18.13 by midnight, via email.