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Course Description

Summary

This will be a class about writers who have invented literary personae which complicate (and in some cases frustrate) the reading of their work. Questions about the uses of persona, the historical contexts in which persona become valuable, and the boundaries of the “literary” – the places where works of literature create anxiety by impinging on ideas about authority, autobiography, and truth – are all germane. Readings by Fernando Pessoa, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, Orson Welles, Clifford Irving, JM Coetzee, JT LeRoy, Michael Chabon, Elena Ferrante, Kevin Young, and other authors both real and fictitious.