32211

WiSe 23/24: Deep Fakes: Impostors, Hoaxes, Con Men, and Frauds in American Literature 1840-1955

Sonja Pyykkö

Kommentar

One of the most worrying trends of recent decades has undoubtedly been the rise of so-called fake news, alternative facts, deepfakes, and other forms of mis- and disinformation. In this “post-truth” era, it has become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between hype and hoax, or even between businessman, con man, and the President of the United States, as the title of Maggie Haberman’s recent Trump biography—Confidence Man (2022)—implies. At the same, though, the record-breaking popularity of documentary films and series about real-life swindlers, con (wo)men, and fraudsters indicates that narratives about deception—or about the exposure of deception—have lost little of their allure. In this seminar, we return to the origins of this phenomenon by examining the art of deception and imposture as they develop in American literature from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. The syllabus provides an historical overview of deception and the various forms it takes in the literature of this period. We begin with newspaper hoaxes by Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain and build our way up to more elaborate fictions of deception by Twain and Herman Melville. We examine modernist experiments with autobiographical imposture and literary hoaxing by Gertrude Stein and the Spectra School of Poetry. We moreover ask what kind of impersonation is involved in narratives of racial and sexual passing on the one hand, and in acts of ethnic imposture—white authors writing autobiographies “as” Black, Jewish, or Native American—on the other. In conclusion, we consider a set of postmodern novels and short stories—by Philip K. Dick, Patricia Highsmith, William Gaddis, and others—that deal with imposture, impersonation, dissimulation, and phoniness. Through this extremely heterogenous corpus, we not only learn about the literary and cultural history of deception and imposture but also practice honing our analytical skills by reading texts that have, in many cases, been written expressly to deceive readers—to outwit or hoodwink those who engage with them. Students are expected to participate in the seminar discussions and to collaborate on writing a glossary with definitions and literary examples of key terms, from “bamboozle” to “trickster,” and their counterparts, including those of authenticity, identity, sincerity, originality, the genuine, and the real—the inverse of the history of deception. Schließen

16 Termine

Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung

Mi, 12:00 - 14:00 16 Termine

Mi, 18.10.2023 12:00 - 14:00

Dozenten:
Sonja Pyykkö