Fake Identity?: The Impostor Narrative in North American Culture

ISBN-13: 9783593501017 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 236 str.

Caroline Rosenthal; Stefanie Schafer

Opis

In North America, where the sociocultural history and national mythologies of the United States and Canada are especially fertile ground for the invention of identities both fake and real, impostor narratives of all kinds abound. From ethnic impersonation to racial passing, going native, and confidence tricks, when it is discovered, imposture incites fascination and scandalyet it also showcases how identities are made. The essays in this book examine both real and fictional renditions of North American imposture, placing these narratives in historical context even as they shed light on larger currents such as identity as performance and the cultural value attributed to authenticity in Western societies. From the narrator of colonial travelogues to postmodernist author and narrator voices, and from the urban con game to trickster shamanism, fake identities are shown to be a negative lens through which the performance of self is revealed."

Spis treści

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments9

Introduction11
Caroline Rosenthal and Stefanie Schäfer

Faking It: Real Impostors and the Fabrication of Identities

The Message Becomes the Messenger: Jonathan Carver's Travels between Imposture and Nationalist Self-Fashioning27
Ramin Djahazi

'The Wish to be a Red Indian': The Canadian Dream of Grey Owl45
Caroline Rosenthal

The Curious Case of Asa Carter and The Education of Little Tree62
Laura Browder

The Impostor as Trickster as Innovator: A Re-Reading of Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan Cycle81
Stefan Löchle

Making the Fake: Fake Identities in Literature, Film, and TV

"You Do an Awfully Good Impression of Yourself": Authorial Impostors in Contemporary American Fiction99
Jan D. Kucharzewski
Reading Fiction under False Assumptions? Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins and her Posthumous Passing for Black111
Yulia Kozyrakis

Unwilling Impostors, Willing Victims: Passing in Two Nineteenth-Century Cuban Novels126
Victor Goldgel

From Rinehartism to Capgras: Imposture and the American Dream143
Christian Knirsch

Watch Me If You Can: The Return of the Impostor in Contemporary Film159
Wieland Schwanebeck

The Con Man and the Close-Up: Imposture in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood175
Martin Holtz

"A Man is Whatever Room He's in": Identity, Home, and Nostalgia in AMC's Mad Men190
Stefanie Mueller

AlterNatives?-A Coda

Identity Joyriding with the Trickster in Drew Hayden Taylor's Motorcycles & Sweetgrass211
Maryann Henck

Pretending to Be an Impostor 227
Drew Hayden Taylor

Contributors231

Index234

O autorze

Caroline Rosenthal ist Professorin für amerikanische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft an der Universität Jena. Stefanie Schäfer, Dr. phil., ist dort wissenschaftliche Assistentin.