Star Texts

A “star text,” or “star image,” as Richard Dyer’s seminal Stars (1979) defines it, is a composite media text, assembled from the various appearances, visual, verbal, and aural, of a celebrity on screen or in the press. Treating celebrity performances as sites of intertextuality, a “star text” is a metanarrative, linking each film in which a given star features. Building on the Lab’s growing interest in Film Studies, this project seeks to operationalize and expand upon Dyer’s concept. Tracing Hollywood’s star texts and mapping their interrelations, our project proposes this matrix of metanarratives as the ground against which the meaning of each performance must figure.