Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in Autobiography
About this ebook
Susanna Egan’s historical survey of texts from early Christendom to the nineteenth century provides an understanding of the author in relation to the text and shows how plagiarism and other false claims have not always been regarded as the frauds we consider them today. She then explores the role of the media in the creation of much contemporary imposture, examining in particular the cases of Jumana Hanna, Norma Khouri, and James Frey. The book also addresses ethnic imposture, deliberate fictions, plagiarism, and ghostwriting, all of which raise moral, legal, historical, and cultural issues. Egan concludes the volume with an examination of how historiography and law failed to support the identities of European Jews during World War II, creating sufficient instability in Jewish identity and doubt about Jewish wartime experience that the impostor could step in. This textual erasure of the Jews of Europe and the refashioning of their experiences in fraudulent texts are examples of imposture as an outcrop of extreme identity crisis.
The first to examine these issues in North America and Europe, Burdens of Proof will be of interest to scholars of life writing and cultural studies.
About the author
Susanna Egan has recently retired from the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. She has written extensively on autobiography and published two monographs: Patterns of Experience in Autobiography (1980) and Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography (2000). Her insecurities about knowledge having increased over the years, she can no longer distinguish between faith and doubt.
