The art of faking: imposture as successful identity performance

Identity never is something we ‘find’ and then ‘keep’ for good but something we continuously have to work at and work for in changing social and cultural contexts. Rather than a stable entity, identity is always malleable and in flux and needs to be re-invented and stabilized in repeated performances among various groups. The construction of personal identity thus always requires an audience which has to validate the performance as convincing, true and authentic. Identity, in other words, relies on the recognition of the ‘Self ‘ through an ‘Other’. Cases of imposture, first of all, constitute instances of successful performances in which an audience became convinced of, and sometimes enthralled with, a staged identity. We, secondly, can only speak of imposture if such an identity is then recognized as ‘fake’; otherwise we simply continue to believe in it. It is, then, neither the performance nor the resultant identity that mark an imposture as fake but the revelation of the fact that someone appropriated an identity he or she was not entitled to. Imposture, thirdly, often causes a scandal because people feel betrayed and outraged that someone pretended to be a member of a certain group in order to gain status and/or profit. Often, however, people also feel ashamed of their own poor judgement and for wholeheartedly having bought the performance of the imposter. It is the spectre and fetish of authenticity itself that often produces imposture and the audience's need for believable identities.

As the introductory chapter for this volume convincingly argues, imposture is a complex act which raises fundamental questions about symbolic and social orders. Just like the breaking of a taboo, in the end, serves to reinforce the norms of a society at a given time, successful acts of imposture and their later revelation disturb the social order and lay bare its underlying parameters and mechanisms. The more successful an imposture, the greater the uproar at its revelation, because not only the imposter but the audience is being exposed. Imposters not only tell us a lot about how identity is constructed in general but also reflect on the cultural beliefs, desires and stereotypes of their audience at a certain time. Hence imposture, as the editors of this volume conclude, has great analytical potential.

Points of Departure

MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS AGO—in 1985—Reingard M. Nischik coedited a book that, despite its modest title Gaining Ground, was in fact ground breaking. It blazed a trail for Canadian Literary Studies in Europe while the field back home was still in the process of becoming part of the institutional grid. The volume, which Nischik co-edited with the renowned Canadian author and scholar Robert Kroetsch, brought together seventeen European critics from seven countries and provided insights on topics ranging from Canadian Postmodernism to “Found” Poetry. While the main thrust of the book was comprised of in-depth studies of individual Canadian authors and their works, its second part, written by Reingard Nischik, assessed the state of Canadian Studies in Europe by giving an overview of academic activities and publications as well as programs and institutions focusing on Canadian Literature in European countries. Nischik's first stocktaking laid the groundwork for much subsequent research in European Canadian Studies and became a milestone that is still frequently referenced today, see, for instance, Beyond “Understanding Canada”: Transnational Perspectives on Canadian Studies (Tanti et al., 2017). Nischik's motivation was “to make better known to an international audience how [and to what extent] Canadian literature is treated in Europe” (Kroetsch and Nischik 1985, 250). And indeed, Gaining Ground achieved in Europe what Margaret Atwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) did in Canada: it put Canadian Literature on the map and charted the territory of what was at the time still shaky ground.

The book was greeted enthusiastically on both sides of the Atlantic and considered “a breakthrough in the academic acceptance of Canadian literary studies abroad” (Keith 1986, 158). Not only did it testify to the quality of work European scholars had done on Canadian literature; it also made its Canadian readers reflect on their own creative and critical practices and traditions. Frank Moher thus considered it “an engrossing, and exotic, exercise in seeing ourselves as others see us” (1986, 44), while Renate Usmiani urged: “The book should make Canadian scholars sit up and take notice” (1986, 236). Such Canadian self-consciousness and (literary) soul searching, although even more dominant in the 1960s and ‘70s, was still paradigmatic for the time of Gaining Ground's publication— and is not surprising given the comparatively recent emergence and institutionalization of both Canadian literature as such and Canadian Studies as a field.

THIS BOOK IS A TRIBUTE to the longstanding work Reingard Nischik has done in Canadian and in Comparative North American Studies. It is published on the occasion of her retirement from the university— although she will continue to publish and be a voice in Canadian and Comparative Studies—and to take stock of recent work by Canadianists around the world. The focus is deliberately broad. Most pieces compare American and Canadian artifacts and range from literature to opera to visual culture. Reingard's exceptional endeavors in making Canadian literature known beyond Canada are honored by two prominent Canadian writers and academics, Margaret Atwood and Aritha van Herk, in their creative pieces in the coda to this book. Included in the coda are also a few photographs as visual testimony to a long academic journey. Both editors are former students of Reingard, and this book is also a token of their gratitude for decades of academic support and friendship. Throughout her career, Reingard Nischik has put enormous efforts into successfully promoting promising young scholars. We speak for all of them today in saying: thank you, Reingard!

Books are made of great ideas and contributions but also of thorough editing, proofreading, and attention to a plethora of details. We would like to thank Florian Wagner, Caroline Bündgen, and Amanda Halter for their conscientious and efficient proofreading and formatting of this volume. Last but not least, we would like to thank Jim Walker from Camden House who, as always, has been incredibly supportive, level-headed, and competent. This book was supported by funding from the Office for Equal Opportunity, Family Affairs, and Diversity at the University of Konstanz and the German Association of Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries.

Introduction

Drinks and drinking not only sustain and nourish the body but, as a social practice, represent the symbolic orders of a particular culture in a specific historical setting. Drinks ‘signify’, as Roland Barthes put it with respect to food, because they obtain a symbolic value which moves well beyond their function as substance. Drinking practices enforce social structures and serve as symbolic acts in which gender, class, ethnic, regional or national identities are constituted. A ‘geography of drinks’, David Grigg claims, reveals a society's intra- and international political agendas. Drinks signify the value systems of a culture as well as the rituals necessary for constituting distinctive cultural identities; they often highlight competing ideologies. Literary texts in particular allow us to reconstruct the significance of drinking practices of earlier periods.

The following essay will investigate the meaning and function of drinks in Susan Warner's sentimental novel The Wide, Wide World. An analysis of the representation of tea, coffee and wine shows that Warner's text cannot merely be read as sentimental or domestic fiction but that it contributed to defining ‘Americanness’, an undertaking of fundamental importance for the period of the American Renaissance, in which Warner's novel was written. By looking at various representations of drinks in The Wide, Wide World, this chapter seeks to illustrate how Warner transfers the rhetoric and values of the domestic sphere into the arena of international politics and thus partakes in defining Americanness and in promoting American democracy.

Introduction

Carol Shields'sfiction was for a long time labeled, and often belittled, as “domestic fiction,” a critical perception that changed only with the sweeping success of her novel The Stone Diaries (1993), which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General's Award, among other prizes. Critics have often underestimated Shields's fiction and overlooked the subtle intricacies in her texts, which, in an allegedly light fashion, deal with fundamental issues of life. Most of Shields's stories indeed pay close attention to the realities of quotidian life, but by describing the familiar from a slightly different angle they defamiliarize the known and point out the surreal and uncanny in the familiar. Shields's works never rendered the everyday and domestic sphere as simple, unambiguous, or insignificant but always represented it in its depth, complexity, and sometimes absurdity.

Shields's last novel, Unless, deals with the urban space of Toronto and is written from the perspective of a middle-aged, middle-class woman. The novel evokes the city in four distinct ways: first, it depicts distinctly urban lifestyles and discourses; second, it draws on real landmarks and sites in Toronto; third, it recalls textual representations and earlier images of Toronto, albeit without explicating them; and last, Unless deals with the city as a literary market place.

Siri Hustvedt's 2003 novelWHAT I LOVED is set in the vibrant art scene of New York City and investigates “the glory of urban freedom and indifference.” The urban space of New York is represented as offering a myriad of possibilities for inventing and reinventing personal identity. While such an abundance of options is portrayed as liberating on the one hand, the novel also points out the potential violence such supposedly limitless opportunities harbor. What I Loved resonates with myths of New York as the Big Apple — a city of superlatives in economic and artistic ways, a city where “anything goes” and where norms and laws can be overruled, and a city where national myths such as the notion of American Exceptionalism or the rags-to-riches myth flourish. Hustvedt's novel portrays New York as exciting and inspiring but at the same time shows that the perpetual hunger for something new, more exciting, or more spectacular causes a “regeneration through violence,” as Slotkin puts it. Just as the idea of Manifest Destiny, the West, or the frontier not only opened up new realms and possibilities but also caused violence and destruction, Hustvedt's text points out how the mythologically charged space of New York makes but also breaks people.

THE LONG PROCESS of writing and editing this book has a rich subtext of private and academic life: my son Leonard was born during that time, and it was his laughter, courage, and ability to seize the day that kept me going. Without the support of my family I could not have carried out this project. I am grateful to my parents, Rosemarie and Klemens Rosenthal, who at various times literally gave me a room of my own while they took loving care of their grandson. I also whole-heartedly want to thank my husband, Peter Braun, for the many fruitful discussions that helped me through the thicket of writing and, most of all, for proving that each of us can have the better of both worlds — family and an academic career. I started working on this study as an Assistant Professor at the University of Constance, and I am grateful to the wonderful North American Studies team there: Reingard Nischik, my long-time academic mentor, has been supportive of me and this book throughout, and on various levels; discussing my project in her research colloquium, especially with Dr. Eva Gruber and Julia Breitbach, has been invaluable. I finished this book as an Associate Professor at the University of Heidelberg and edited it at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, where I was appointed Chair of American Literature in 2009. My new team here has been extremely reliable, highly efficient, and deeply conscientious in proof-reading the final manuscript and in giving it its finishing touches.