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Self-presentation of micro-celebrities in China : a case study of Papi Jiang
Author
Li, Danyun
Supervisor
Weninger, Csilla
Abstract
In the past few decades, there has been a burgeoning of micro-celebrities as a new force in the celebrity industry. As Driessens (2012) discussed, what we have been witnessing is a process of celebrification and celebritizaiton both at the individual level and societal level. Resorting to the advantages of the mobile Web 2.0 era, microcelebrities have fully appropriated the internet and media resources to present and promote their “self” for public consumption. Hence, the decentralized “demotic turn” of celebrity culture has come into formation, which very much emphasizes the “ordinariness” of common people.
While a rich body of literature focuses on studies of micro-celebrity’s identity, most research concerns celebrities’ activities from a marketing viewpoint. There has been very little scholarly investigation of micro-celebrity’s self-presentation from the perspective of social communication. Though online celebrity’s authenticity is a hot issue within the field of celebrity discourse, few scholars have paid attention to microcelebrity’s self-presentation as a performance in the age of presentational media.
Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to make a case for celebrity selfpresentation as a performance study, through the case study of one female microcelebrity in China. It builds on a theoretical synergy of social media, discourse analysis, celebrity culture, and dramaturgy. Specifically, the research focuses on describing the micro-celebrity’s (Papi Jiang) expressive style by drawing on Goffman’s performance theory. The methodological frameworks combined corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse studies for data analysis. The corpus analysis part reveals overarching thematic signals of the protagonist’s expressive style, in which negative emotions predominate. At the same time, findings from three in-depth case analyses not only verify the negative prosody identified by the corpus analysis, but also add by describing how Papi’s style centers on intensified emotion, expressed through a variety of means, such as repetitions, parallelism, comparison and contrast, body language, and vlogging resources. The study’s primary contributions lie in its application of Goffman’s performance theory to the study of celebrity discourse on Chinese social media. In addition, the dissertation’s combination of corpus stylistics as quantitative study and discourse analysis as qualitative study offers a methodological contribution to the study of expressive style as an aspect of micro-celebrity discourse.
While a rich body of literature focuses on studies of micro-celebrity’s identity, most research concerns celebrities’ activities from a marketing viewpoint. There has been very little scholarly investigation of micro-celebrity’s self-presentation from the perspective of social communication. Though online celebrity’s authenticity is a hot issue within the field of celebrity discourse, few scholars have paid attention to microcelebrity’s self-presentation as a performance in the age of presentational media.
Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to make a case for celebrity selfpresentation as a performance study, through the case study of one female microcelebrity in China. It builds on a theoretical synergy of social media, discourse analysis, celebrity culture, and dramaturgy. Specifically, the research focuses on describing the micro-celebrity’s (Papi Jiang) expressive style by drawing on Goffman’s performance theory. The methodological frameworks combined corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse studies for data analysis. The corpus analysis part reveals overarching thematic signals of the protagonist’s expressive style, in which negative emotions predominate. At the same time, findings from three in-depth case analyses not only verify the negative prosody identified by the corpus analysis, but also add by describing how Papi’s style centers on intensified emotion, expressed through a variety of means, such as repetitions, parallelism, comparison and contrast, body language, and vlogging resources. The study’s primary contributions lie in its application of Goffman’s performance theory to the study of celebrity discourse on Chinese social media. In addition, the dissertation’s combination of corpus stylistics as quantitative study and discourse analysis as qualitative study offers a methodological contribution to the study of expressive style as an aspect of micro-celebrity discourse.
Date Issued
2019
Call Number
P94.5.C452 Li