Garry Marshall’s new ensemble romantic comedy, “New Year’s Eve,” celebrates love, hope, forgiveness, second chances and fresh starts, with intertwining stories told amidst the pulse and promise of New York City on the most dazzling night of the year. In this breezy bit of escapist fare, Marshall serves up romance in all of its many delicious and maddening stages as his large cast of characters discovers love, fun, and excitement amidst the countdown to 2012 leading up to the ceremonial “ball drop” in Time Square.
Our current obsession with celebrity has had a profound, even distorting effect on the contemporary literary market and cultures of reading. A new reliance on ghost-writing and a fascination with fame and scandal, for example, have disrupted post-enlightenment fixations on the author-category and literary merit, bringing us to an interesting point of contact with earlier cultures of literacy. As the reputation of Geoffrey Chaucer himself demonstrates, the simultaneously repellent and fascinating nature of modern celebrity culture presents clear parallels with that of the late medieval world. Chaucer's own celebrity emerged quickly and has been enduring. From the seemingly reverent imitations of his contemporaries and followers - like Usk, Hoccleve and Lydgate - through the popularity of Chauceriana in early modern print, to the countless appropriations and adaptations of his work in our own times, Chaucer has been a more or less constant star within the English literary canon. And Chaucer was deeply interested in questions of celebrity: in the relationship between fame and authority, in the fame of literary creations such as the Wife of Bath, in legends and lives.
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