The Allure of Celebrities: Unpacking Their Polysemic Consumer Appeal

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.To explain their deep resonance with consumers this paper unpacks the individual constituents of a celebrity’s polysemic appeal. While celebrities are traditionally theorised as unidimensional ‘semiotic receptacles of cultural meaning’, we conceptualise them here instead as human beings/performers with a multi-constitutional, polysemic consumer appeal. Supporting evidence is drawn from autoethnographic data collected over a total period of 25 months and structured through a hermeneutic analysis. In ‘rehumanising’ the celebrity, the study finds that each celebrity offers the individual consumer a unique and very personal parasocial appeal as a) the performer, b) the ‘private’ person behind the public performer, c) the tangible manifestation of either through products, and d) the social link to other consumers. The stronger these constituents, individually or symbiotically, appeal to the consumer’s personal desires the more s/he feels emotionally attached to this particular celebrity. Although using autoethnography means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the depth of insight this approach garners sufficiently unpacks the polysemic appeal of celebrities to consumers. The findings encourage talent agents, publicists and marketing managers to reconsider underlying assumptions in their talent management and/or celebrity endorsement practices. While prior research on celebrity appeal has tended to enshrine celebrities in a “dehumanised” structuralist semiosis, which erases the very idea of individualised consumer meanings, this paper reveals the multi-constitutional polysemy of any particular celebrity’s personal appeal as a performer and human being to any particular consumer

Down with reticence: modem fiction, censorship and the politics of sexual representation

While in recent years the aesthetics and politics of British Modernism has been reevaluated and the concept and function of literary censorship redefined. Modernism's privileged status in the struggle against and the ultimate defeat of censorship remains largely unquestioned. This thesis argues, however, that the vital role played by Naturalist, New Woman and Edwardian writers in the battle against censorship and the dominant sexual ideologies that bolstered it has been significantly underestimated. It contends that late-Victorian and Edwardian writers not only produced transgressive sexual representations within the confines of an existent culture of censorship, but also reflexively incorporated themes and issues of censorship into their fiction. Moreover, the thesis situates this specific challenge to literary censorship within the broader intellectual challenge to traditional sexual morality posed by new scientific discourses, especially those that emerged from evolutionary biology. After exploring recent critical conceptualisations and contextualisations of censorship in relation to other articulations of power, those texts that most forcefully contested Victorian sexual reticence are analysed. These include the Naturalist novels of Emile Zola, George Moore and Thomas Hardy, the New Woman fiction of Grant Allen and George Egerton, and the Edwardian sex novels of H, G. Wells, Hubert Wales and Herman Sudermann. While demonstrating how these texts deploy rhetorical strategies that challenge censorship and traditional sexual morality, this thesis also focuses on the complex sexual politics of these narratives to demonstrate how texts can both oppose traditional morality but also reinforce dominant sexual ideologies in new paradigms of scientific rationality

The Act of Creation: Speech Acts and Contextual Relevance

UMKC Honors Colleg

A Phonemic and Phonetic Analysis of the Folk Speech of Bedford County, Tennessee

Until recently, no systematic study of Tennessee folk speech had been performed. This study, descriptive in scope, will help fill a void and provide valuable data for determining Tennessee\u27s relationship to other American dialects. Five informants, each one fitting Hans Kurath\u27s Type I, Group A classification, were interviewed using The Questionnaire for the Investigation of American Regional English: Based on the Work Sheets of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada (Orton and Wright, 1972). The phonological material obtained from the five tape recorded interviews is presented in a unitary phonemic system along with characteristic allophonic and free variation (incidence of the phonemes)

Infusion of select leukemia-reactive TCR Vbeta+ T cells provides graft-versus-leukemia responses with minimization of graft-versus-host disease following murine hematopoietic stem cell transplantation

AbstractT-cell receptor (TCR) Vbeta-expression analysis by complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3)-size spectratyping can identify the reactive populations in an immunologic response. This analysis was used in this study to characterize the Vbeta responses of C57BL/6 (B6) CD4+ and CD8+ T cells directed to either alloantigen (against [B6xDBA/2]F1; anti-H2d) or the syngeneic myeloid leukemia MMB3.19. Vbeta families exhibiting reactivity to the leukemia cells were then enriched for and administered in both syngeneic and allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) models to assess in vivo graft-versus-leukemia (GVL) potential. In syngeneic transplants, enrichment for pools of selected Vbeta families (Vbeta7, -11, and -13) of T cells or for a single Vbeta family (Vbeta7) of CD4+ T cells conveyed a beneficial GVL response to the recipients. Furthermore, in the haploidentical allogeneic model, both Vbeta6,7-enriched donor B6 T cells and Vbeta7-enriched CD4+ T cells exhibited significant GVL responses with concomitant minimization of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) development compared with equal numbers of unfractionated T cells. These results suggest that CDR3-size spectratype analysis of and subsequent selection from donor T-cell repertoires can be an effective approach to separate GVL and GVHD potential following allogeneic HSCT.Biol Blood Marrow Transplant 2001;7(4):187-96

'Don't forget to like, share and subscribe': Digital autopreneurs in a neoliberal world

We seek to move beyond the exalted figure of the heroic entrepreneur that predominates the study of entrepreneurship; to take a less agentic view of entrepreneurship; to tell stories rarely told, and to demonstrate how historical and technocultural forces are as instrumental in directing entrepreneurial activity as individual motivations. We enlist the work of Foucault and others, in conjunction with netnographic fieldwork that focuses on an assemblage of young YouTubers striving to become what we call autopreneurs. We reveal how they internalize a structure of feeling, divined from neoliberal ideology, that shapes their everyday affairs. We find that three main wellsprings - the dynamics of competition, the creativity dispositif, and technologies of the self – detrimentally affect the quality of their lives and collectively institute a ‘cruel optimism’ which promises much but delivers little. We conclude with some thoughts on the ramifications of our work for the study of entrepreneurship

An Algorithm for Cellular Reprogramming

The day we understand the time evolution of subcellular elements at a level of detail comparable to physical systems governed by Newton's laws of motion seems far away. Even so, quantitative approaches to cellular dynamics add to our understanding of cell biology, providing data-guided frameworks that allow us to develop better predictions about and methods for control over specific biological processes and system-wide cell behavior. In this paper we describe an approach to optimizing the use of transcription factors in the context of cellular reprogramming. We construct an approximate model for the natural evolution of a synchronized population of fibroblasts, based on data obtained by sampling the expression of some 22,083 genes at several times along the cell cycle. (These data are based on a colony of cells that have been cell cycle synchronized) In order to arrive at a model of moderate complexity, we cluster gene expression based on the division of the genome into topologically associating domains (TADs) and then model the dynamics of the expression levels of the TADs. Based on this dynamical model and known bioinformatics, we develop a methodology for identifying the transcription factors that are the most likely to be effective toward a specific cellular reprogramming task. The approach used is based on a device commonly used in optimal control. From this data-guided methodology, we identify a number of validated transcription factors used in reprogramming and/or natural differentiation. Our findings highlight the immense potential of dynamical models models, mathematics, and data guided methodologies for improving methods for control over biological processes