Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Celebrity Studies on 26/10/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/19392397.2016.1233708
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Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Everyday oracles
T2 - authors on Twitter
AU - Myers, Greg
N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Celebrity Studies on 26/10/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/19392397.2016.1233708
PY - 2016/10
Y1 - 2016/10
N2 - Most authors participate, reluctantly or enthusiastically, in a cycle of promotion, including book tours, literary festivals, interviews, and now social media. Some authors make regular use of Twitter to post updates about professional activities, comments on events in their everyday lives, news of readings, statements of opinions, photos, links, or retweets. This study examines tweets by 10 authors, using corpus linguistic tools to find stylistic patterns characteristic of the corpus as a whole or of individual authors. The article then looks at tweets by others that mention the authors or use quotations from the authors in new contexts, creating an online presence for authors whether they tweet themselves or not. Authors are subject to the same tension between ordinariness and specialness that others have noted with stars in music, television, film, or fashion. Literature, because of its assumed cultural position, and its production in private, has sometimes been seen as being apart from and opposed to the cultural system of celebrity and promotion. But this cultural position also means the ordinariness of authors is treated as surprising and interesting, while the specialness makes them available to all as oracles.
AB - Most authors participate, reluctantly or enthusiastically, in a cycle of promotion, including book tours, literary festivals, interviews, and now social media. Some authors make regular use of Twitter to post updates about professional activities, comments on events in their everyday lives, news of readings, statements of opinions, photos, links, or retweets. This study examines tweets by 10 authors, using corpus linguistic tools to find stylistic patterns characteristic of the corpus as a whole or of individual authors. The article then looks at tweets by others that mention the authors or use quotations from the authors in new contexts, creating an online presence for authors whether they tweet themselves or not. Authors are subject to the same tension between ordinariness and specialness that others have noted with stars in music, television, film, or fashion. Literature, because of its assumed cultural position, and its production in private, has sometimes been seen as being apart from and opposed to the cultural system of celebrity and promotion. But this cultural position also means the ordinariness of authors is treated as surprising and interesting, while the specialness makes them available to all as oracles.
KW - celebrity
KW - authorship
KW - everyday life
KW - singularity
KW - quotation
KW - Twitter
U2 - 10.1080/19392397.2016.1233708
DO - 10.1080/19392397.2016.1233708
M3 - Journal article
VL - 7
SP - 476
EP - 492
JO - Celebrity Studies
JF - Celebrity Studies
SN - 1939-2397
IS - 4
ER -