ABSTRACT
My interest is not in Elvis Presley the person, but in the social phenomenon arising around his life after he died, or what the culture critic Greil Marcus calls the "Dead Elvis." 1 With Dead Elvis, the boundary between an aesthetic sublime and a spiritual sublime or between a popular cultural obsession and a religious obsession has become blurred. I locate the social phenomenon of the Dead Elvis at this fuzzy border in contemporary culture that articulates 2 with the commodification 3 of everything Elvis for personal and monetary profit.
