Real phonies: The history of authenticity, 1947--1998

This dissertation examines a collection of post-1945 novels and films that concern themselves with the notion of individual authenticity. In most contemporary scholarship, attention to authenticity focuses on questions of race and ethnicity, but interest in the “realness” of persons appears in many contexts during this period, suggesting that our current interest in ethnic identity can be situated within a larger set of concerns about the self and its constitution. Examining a range of novels and films—by Jean-Paul Sartre, J. D. Salinger, Walker Percy, Elia Kazan, Patricia Highsmith, Don DeLillo, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, John Guare, Cameron Crowe, and others—“Real Phonies” argues that contemporary ideas about such apparently diverse topics as phoniness, depression, murder and serial murder, method acting, and performativity can only be properly understood in relation to the issue of authenticity. The categorical tenacity of the concept, however, belies a series of fundamental revisions to the term, revisions themselves required to account for a self conceived first in existentialist, then in constructionist, and finally in either biological or performative terms. Equally importantly, these seemingly disparate topics are illustrative of the issues at stake in the consideration of authenticity as such. The epistemological problem of self-knowledge (as illustrated by phoniness and depression) rapidly becomes the practical question of what you can know about other people (murderers and serial killers), and ends with a discussion of what you can know about yourself as another person (as suggested by method acting and the performative). In these texts and others, the notions of phoniness and authenticity as qualities of persons are emblematic of a larger literary interest in the ontology of selfhood, an interest that—while certainly present in the literatures of many periods—acquired a newfound urgency in response to the proliferation of linguistic, social-theoretical, and even biological knowledge during the latter part of this century.