Impostors : literary hoaxes and cultural authenticity /

Writing a new page in the surprisingly long history of literary deceit, Impostors examines a series of literary hoaxes, deceptions that involved flagrant acts of cultural appropriation. This book looks at authors who posed as people they were not, in order to claim a different ethnic, class, or othe...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Miller, Christopher L., 1953- (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: Chicago, IL : The University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Subjects:
Table of Contents:
  • Part 1. The land of the free and the home of the hoax
  • Slave narratives and white lies
  • The Forrest and The Tree
  • Danny Santiago and the ethics of ethnicity
  • Go ask Amazon
  • "I never saw it as a hoax": JT Leroy
  • Margaret B. Jones, Misha Defonseca, and "stolen suffering"
  • Minority literature and postcolonial theory
  • French and francophone, fraud and fake
  • What is a (French) author?
  • Part 2. The French paradox and the francophone problem
  • The real, the romantic, and the fake in the nineteenth century
  • The single-use hoax: Diderot's La Religieuse
  • Merimee's Illyrical Illusions
  • Bakary Diallo: fausse-bonte
  • Elissa Rhais, literacy, and identity
  • Sex and temperament in postwar hoaxing: Boris Vian and Raymond Queneau
  • Camara lie? two African classics between canonicity and oblivion
  • Gary/Ajar: the hoaxing of the Goncourt prize and the making-cute of the Immigrant
  • Who is Chimo? sex, lies, and death in the Banlieue
  • Part 3. I can't believe it's not Beur: Jack-Alain Léger, Paul Smail, and Vivre Me Tue
  • Before "Paul Smail"
  • Vivre Ne Tue (living kills me, or smile)
  • The popular press reads Vivre Me Tue
  • Smail speaks (by fax)
  • The Leak
  • Did “Hundreds” of Readers Write to Paul Smaïl?
  • Truth and Lies à la Léger
  • The Scholars Weigh In
  • Azouz Begag’s Outrage and the Right to Write
  • Reading: A Choice?
  • The Parts He Played.