Faking It: The End of History and the Rise of Memory, Identity, and Personality

Workshop A: seminar room P102 (2nd floor, Philosophicum)

Georgiana Banita (Bamberg), Andrew S. Gross (FU Berlin)

 

1. Georgiana Banita (Bamberg), "The Intimate Lives of National Security: The Rosenbergs, Julian Assange, Valerie Plame"

2. Andrew S. Gross (FU Berlin), "Conservatism and the Populist Self: Chambers, Nixon, Wills"

3. Greta Olson (Gießen), "Writing and Revising Selfhood in Presidential Candidates’ Life Writings and in Attack Ads"

4. Jesper Reddig (Münster), "Multicultural Conservatives: Russian Jewish Women Writers Forge the Contemporary American Self"

5. Michael Butter (Freiburg), "The Truth Has Been Silenced Long Enough: Faking Conspiracy in the Novels of Dan Brown"

6. Dustin Breitenwischer (FU Berlin), "Life and Times Of …: Promethean (Counter)Narratives in Rap Music"

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Contact:

Dr. Georgiana Banita
Georgiana.Banita@uni-bamberg.de

Andrew S. Gross, PhD
asgross@zedat.fu-berlin.de

Prof. Dr. Greta Olson
Greta.Olson@anglistik.uni-giessen.de

Jesper Reddig, M.A.
j_redd01@uni-muenster.de

Dr. Michael Butter
michael.butter@frias.uni-freiburg.de

Dustin Breitenwischer, M.A.
dustin.breitenwischer@googlemail.com

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Recent decades have witnessed a renewed interest in life writing, testimonials, memory studies, and trauma theory. Neorealism’s rediscovery of the family in the work of Jonathan Franzen, Paul Auster, and Richard Powers may also be linked to the psychological models of the personal that are a part of contemporary literary and theoretical trends. The political seems to have gone personal again, but the personal is contested as never before. Part of this has to do with what might be called the ideology of identity. A growing number of critics argue that identity politics has entered into a strange-bedfellow relationship with neo-liberalism. Is "life" the locus of personal experience or an ideological weapon that personalizes—and thereby depoliticizes—economic and theoretical trends? This question approaches the globalization debates that have raged since the end of the Cold War from a deliberately more intimate perspective.

The workshop will bring together papers that scrutinize the complex relations between life writing, fictionality, and personal authenticity in the United States since 1945 and especially in the aftermath of the Cold War. Confessional poets such as Lowell, Plath, and Berryman strongly identified with Jews in the post-war context. This story has already received some attention. What remains under-researched is the link between (mis-) identification and more recent debates (fueled by the media interest in simulacral life stories) about auto/biographical forgeries and hoaxes. How are forged identities related to the very real need to establish membership in cultural and social groups, ranging from "minority" groups to national and transnational communities? It is by now a critical commonplace that identities are performed. But how are these performances judged and disciplined?

We will include papers that examine particular cases of false identity and counterfeit life stories, theorize authenticity (distinct from “authenticated” facts) as the core aesthetic of auto/biographical shams, and engage the cultural history of the forged American self as an emblem of individualism and the political struggle for rights. The workshop as a whole will seek to understand how patterns of projection, appropriation, and deceit have troubled and enriched the traditions of American life narrative; it will also explore how changing styles of life narration have impacted liberal discourse and cultural criticism. Papers could address some of the following areas:

• Memory, testimony, authenticity
• Liberal theory, individualism, privacy, and self
• Race, ethnicity, and impersonation
• Fictional biographies/biopics, counterfactual auto/biography, fake auto/biographies (Clifford Irving, James Frey, Forrest Carter, JT LeRoy, etc.), ghostwriting
• Auto/biography and the lyric imagination, confessional poetry
• Fabricated life narrative and the Holocaust
• Partisan political life writing, presidential memoirs, conspiracy theories
• (Un)authorized celebrity biographies
• Reclusive authors and biographical speculation
• Autobiographical performance, self-fashioning, and self-promotion
• Political transparency and US truth culture after Wikileaks
• Fake news, satire (The Daily Show, etc.)