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Humanities
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Exploring Authenticity in Contemporary Literatures in English
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Exploring Authenticity in Contemporary Literatures in English

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 October 2022) | Viewed by 12836

Special Issue Editors

Prof. David Brauner

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Guest Editor
Department of English Literature, University of Reading, Whiteknights PO Box 218, UK
Interests: contemporary American fiction; twentieth-century Jewish literature and graphic novels
Dr. Genoveffa Giambona

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Guest Editor
Department of English Literature, University of Reading, Woodley, Reading RG5 4DG, UK
Interests: postcoloniality; identity; authenticity; hybridity; diaspora writing and gender in contemporary literature; especially in the context of paradigms of home and belonging expressed by female writers and how this also relates to discourses of gender and race

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue will build on the work presented at the symposium to be held at the University of Reading on the 1st and 2nd of November, exploring the different ways in which authenticity is constructed and represented in contemporary literature. The strongest contributors to the symposium will be invited to revise their papers for consideration in the Special Issue, and additional contributions will be solicited from leading international scholars in the field.

Culture in general, and literature in particular, seem to be concerned with authenticity, or lack thereof, more than ever before: authenticity in politics, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality. In contemporary fiction, in particular, there appears to be a turn away from fiction as it is traditionally understood, and a move towards authenticity as an ethical marker of subjectivity. The popularity of such narratives seems to suggest that we long for things we experience as lost, searching for an identity, be it individual or collective, that eludes us. But what is authenticity, and what does it entail in a globalised world? How is authenticity constructed and deconstructed in contemporary literature? In a ‘post-truth’ world—a world of ‘fake news’, viral conspiracy theories and catfishing—is the concept of authenticity redundant, or more vital than ever? The aim of the symposium is to explore ideas of authenticity in their various manifestations in literatures in English. The online event will take place over two half days on 01-02 November 2021.

The organisers invite proposals of no more than 250 words for twenty-minute papers from scholars of all career stages. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Authenticity and gender
  • Authenticity and sexuality
  • Authenticity and ethnicity
  • Authenticity and nationality
  • Authenticity and the global/the local 
  • Realism, hyperrealism, naturalism
  • Authenticity in the postmodern world
  • Authenticity and intertextuality: concepts such as original literary work, reproduction, printed representation
  • Ghostwriting, diaries, biographies, autobiographies, autofiction
  • Authenticity and adaptation
  • Authenticity and creativity

The keynote lecture will be given by Professor Daniel Lea, Oxford Brookes University.

When submitting your abstract, please also include a brief biographical sketch of up to 50 words. Proposals must be submitted to Jeni Giambona at g.giambona@pgr.reading.ac.uk by Friday 10 September 2021.

Please send an approximately 250-word proposal to the guest editor () beforehand, ideally by April 30th, 2022. Drafts of articles should be sent by the deadline indicated at the opening of this call for papers. Papers will be peer-reviewed. Please do not hesitate if you have any questions.

Prof. David Brauner
Dr. Genoveffa Giambona
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • authenticity
  • contemporary literature
  • autofiction
  • life writing
  • adaptation
  • originality

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

20 pages, 364 KiB  
Article
In Pursuit of the “Real” Nigeria/n through the Archives of Heinemann’s African Writers Series
by Sue Walsh
Humanities 2023, 12(5), 88; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050088 - 24 Aug 2023
Viewed by 1057
Abstract
This paper will depart from the premise that with the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe as its flagship author, exemplar and editorial adviser, Heinemann Educational Books, which aimed to represent Africa and Africans through its African Writers Series (AWS) had a tendency to privilege [...] Read more.
This paper will depart from the premise that with the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe as its flagship author, exemplar and editorial adviser, Heinemann Educational Books, which aimed to represent Africa and Africans through its African Writers Series (AWS) had a tendency to privilege and prioritise realist literary expressions coming out of Africa. This, combined with the fact that the series was published by an educational company looking for a way to market its product in an environment that did not yet have a place for African writers when it was first launched, might also be regarded as having fostered a tendency within the publishing house to treat the works submitted to it more as socio-historical documents than as works of literary fiction and to lead to their framing in anthropological terms. The paper will investigate the precise terms in which this takes place in two case studies of some of the archival material relating to Heinemann’s interest in representing Northern Nigeria and Nigerians in the early years of the series, and it will investigate the consequences and implications of a drive towards producing a series that could be marketed as representative. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Exploring Authenticity in Contemporary Literatures in English)
11 pages, 240 KiB  
Article
‘Is This the Real Me? What Is the Real Me?’: Deconstructing Authenticity in Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s Need More Love
by David Brauner
Humanities 2023, 12(3), 43; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12030043 - 29 May 2023
Viewed by 928
Abstract
In spite of being a central figure in the underground comix scene, a trailblazer in the field of female-authored comics, and one of the progenitors of the graphic memoir, there has been relatively little scholarship on Aline Kominsky-Crumb. For much of her career, [...] Read more.
In spite of being a central figure in the underground comix scene, a trailblazer in the field of female-authored comics, and one of the progenitors of the graphic memoir, there has been relatively little scholarship on Aline Kominsky-Crumb. For much of her career, she was in the shadow of her husband, Robert Crumb, an iconic figure of the counterculture, and any attention she has received for her own work tended to be marred by condescension or predicated on the naïve assumption that, as Susan Kirtley claims, it ‘showcase[s] a raw, unvarnished authenticity’. It also tended to ignore her writing, focusing almost exclusively on her artwork. In this essay, I analyse her anthology, Need More Love, paying particular attention to the nuances of its uses of text, to argue that Kominsky-Crumb’s work might be read as a sustained, self-reflexive interrogation of the idea of authenticity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Exploring Authenticity in Contemporary Literatures in English)
15 pages, 303 KiB  
Article
“My Whole Life I’ve Been a Fraud”: Resisting Excessive (Self-)Critique and Reaffirming Authenticity as Communal in David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” and Albert Camus’s The Fall
by Allard den Dulk
Humanities 2023, 12(1), 20; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12010020 - 16 Feb 2023
Viewed by 1738
Abstract
The themes of paralyzing, solipsistic self-critique versus the necessarily communal character of authentic, meaningful existence in the work of American novelist David Foster Wallace are best understood in light of existentialism. This article compares Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon” with Albert Camus’s novella [...] Read more.
The themes of paralyzing, solipsistic self-critique versus the necessarily communal character of authentic, meaningful existence in the work of American novelist David Foster Wallace are best understood in light of existentialism. This article compares Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon” with Albert Camus’s novella The Fall, as responses to similar unproductive tendencies within the respective postmodernist and Marxist discourses of their times. Both works portray an absolutist self-critique that produces feelings of (inauthentic) fraudulence and exceptionality; and both include an interlocutor that ultimately makes the reader the direct addressee of the text. In doing so, “Good Old Neon” and The Fall confront the reader with the moral task of resisting excessive (self-)critique and reaffirming authentic, meaningful existence as always arising in connection to others. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Exploring Authenticity in Contemporary Literatures in English)
11 pages, 271 KiB  
Article
Post-Postmodernism, the “Affective Turn”, and Inauthenticity
by George Kowalik
Humanities 2023, 12(1), 7; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12010007 - 10 Jan 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 5072
Abstract
This article considers Rachel Greenwald Smith’s concept of the “Affective Turn” in contemporary fiction by looking at a constellation of novels published near the turn of the twenty-first century: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Percival Everett’s Erasure [...] Read more.
This article considers Rachel Greenwald Smith’s concept of the “Affective Turn” in contemporary fiction by looking at a constellation of novels published near the turn of the twenty-first century: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). As Rachel Greenwald Smith claims, this “Turn” offers a “corrective or counter to postmodernist suspicion towards subjective emotion” and has foundations of sincerity and authenticity, which align it with the premise of post-postmodernism. These novels, I argue, collectively engage with the affective turn’s inherent post-postmodern potential, as their authors respond to, challenge, and react against postmodern irony and the license of inauthenticity that comes with this. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Exploring Authenticity in Contemporary Literatures in English)
13 pages, 240 KiB  
Article
Really, Truly Trans and the (Minor) Literary Discontents of Authenticity
by Aaron Hammes
Humanities 2022, 11(6), 143; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060143 - 13 Nov 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1507
Abstract
Identity formation, questions of identity, shifting identities, perceived deviant identities, and reactions (social, political, cultural, individual) to them are the stuff of Bildungsroman as well as more “experimental” subgenres of long-form fiction. For minority/minoritized subjects and authors, questions of identity take on a [...] Read more.
Identity formation, questions of identity, shifting identities, perceived deviant identities, and reactions (social, political, cultural, individual) to them are the stuff of Bildungsroman as well as more “experimental” subgenres of long-form fiction. For minority/minoritized subjects and authors, questions of identity take on a different pallor: their work is expected to engage with questions of identity according to either or both how their subject position confronts marginalization and otherness, and how their subject position conditions every experience they have in the world, both inside and outside community. This inquiry investigates how contemporary transgender minor literature constructs dis/identity through authenticity. Imogen Binnie speculates in her 2013 novel Nevada on the concept of “Really, Truly Trans”, a cipher for identity policing and presumptions of sex–gender authenticity, based on cisnormative characteristics and, occasionally, inter-community phobias and proscriptions. More recently, Torrey Peters challenges measures of trans authenticity through both her titular detransitioner and his former partner in Detransition, Baby. Trans minor literature is an ideal testing ground for phobic public presumptions around “authentic” sex–gender and anti-identitarian strategies of those who are forced to confront purity tests and exclusion or suppression on grounds of authenticity, and each novel presses at phobic majoritarian dictates of authenticity and its presupposed value. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Exploring Authenticity in Contemporary Literatures in English)
10 pages, 250 KiB  
Article
Authenticity and Atwood’s ‘Scientific Turn’
by Myles Chilton
Humanities 2022, 11(6), 134; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060134 - 29 Oct 2022
Viewed by 1427
Abstract
Margaret Atwood’s science/speculative dystopian MaddAddam trilogy—Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013)—opens up questions about how genre-mixing indexes and probes interrelated notions of authenticity. This focus is prompted by the simple question of why Atwood, having [...] Read more.
Margaret Atwood’s science/speculative dystopian MaddAddam trilogy—Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013)—opens up questions about how genre-mixing indexes and probes interrelated notions of authenticity. This focus is prompted by the simple question of why Atwood, having established worldwide renown for realist novels of socio-historical authenticity, switched to blending realism with science/speculative fiction. Through analyzing how the trilogy departs from realism, while never truly embracing SF, the paper argues that while the realist novel may offer the strongest representations of authentic psychological states, larger questions of epistemic authority and the state of our world demand a literature that authenticates knowledge. The MaddAddam trilogy challenges the notion that realism’s social, existential and moral concerns are more authentic when supported with a scientific explanatory logic. Authenticity is thus found in a negotiation between Truth and whether to trust in the locations (social and geographical, literary and literal) of knowledge. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Exploring Authenticity in Contemporary Literatures in English)
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