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Before Oprah and TheSmokingGun.com had ever heard of James Frey, there was Clifford Irving. In 1971, he burst onto the literary scene, claiming to have been granted the right to pen the authorized biography of the famously reclusive icon Howard Hughes. Forged documents seemed to bear out his claims, and McGraw-Hill awarded him a contract for the then-enormous sum of $750,000. When Hughes himself emerged from seclusion to denounce Irving as a charlatan, McGraw-Hill stood by their author. It wasn’t until Hughes filed suit, and Swiss bank officials got involved, that Irv! ing finally confessed. The Hoax, first published in 1981, is Irving’s explosive account of his own misdeeds -- and the inspiration for a soon-to-be released movie starring Richard Gere.
What does it mean to be authentic? For many, the search for the authentic provides a powerful source of meaning in a secular age, allowing a person a unique personal identity in a world that seems alienating and conformist. This demand for authenticityâ€"the honest or the realâ€"is one of the most powerful movements in contemporary life, influencing our moral outlook, political views, and consumer behavior.
Yet according to Andrew Potter, when examined closely, our fetish for "authentic" lifestyles or experiencesâ€"organic produce and ecotourism, bikram yoga and performance art, the cult of Oprah and the obsession with Obamaâ€"is actually a form of exclusionary status seeking. The result, he argues, is modernity's malaise: a competitive, self-absorbed individualism that ! creates a shallow consumerist society built on stratification ! and one- upmanship that ultimately erodes genuine relationships and true community.
Weaving together threads of pop culture, history, and philosophy, The Authenticity Hoax reveals how our misguided pursuit of the authentic exacerbates the artificiality of contemporary life that we decry. Potter traces the origins of the authenticity ideal from its roots in the eighteenth century through its adoption by the 1960s counterculture to its centrality in twenty-first-century moral life. He shows how this ideal is manifested through our culture, from the political fates of Sarah Palin and John Edwards to Damien Hirst and his role in contemporary art, from the phenomenon of retirement as a second adolescence to the indignation over James Frey's memoir. From this defiant, brilliant critique, Potter offers a way forward to a meaningful individualism that makes peace with the modern world.
Geoffrey K. Pullum's writings began as columns in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory in 1983. For six years, in almost every issue, under the banner "TOPIC. . .COMMENT," he published a captivating mélange of commentary, criticism, satire, whimsy, and fiction. Those columns are reproduced hereâ€"almost exactly as his friends and colleagues originally warned him not to publish themâ€"along with new material including a foreword by James D. McCawley, a prologue, and a new introduction to each of these clever pieces. Whether making a sneak attack on some sacred cow, delivering a tongue-in-cheek protest against current standards, or supplyin! g a caustic review of some recent development, Pullum remains ! in touch with serious concerns about language and society. At the same time, he reminds the reader not to take linguistics too seriously all of the time.
Pullum will take you on an excursion into the wild and untamed fringes of linguistics. Among the unusual encounters in store are a conversation between Star Trek's Commander Spock and three real earth linguists, the strange tale of the author's imprisonment for embezzling funds from the Campaign for Typographical Freedom, a harrowing account of a day in the research life of four unhappy grammarians, and the true story of how a monograph on syntax was suppressed because the examples were judged to be libelous. You will also find a volley of humorous broadsides aimed at dishonest attributional practices, meddlesome copy editors, mathematical incompetence, and "cracker-barrel philosophy of science." These learned and witty pieces will delight anyone who is fascinated by the quirks of language and linguists.
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