Week 7 Prompt Response

For this week's prompt, I was really interested in reading more about literary hoaxes. I am currently reading Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou, a fiction novel that involves a writer pretending to be someone else. This next part will contain spoilers so you can skip over if you plan on reading the book! 

The novel focuses on Ingrid Yang, a Ph.D. student, whose dissertation is on the Chinese American poet Xiao-Wen Chou. Ingrid discovers that Xiao-Wen Chou is not who he claimed to be. It is revealed that John Smith, a white man, had been pretending to be Xiao-Wen Chou. When the truth is brought to light, things quickly spiral on campus and in Ingrid's life. There is much more to the story (I highly recommend reading the novel) but this is the most important aspect relating to this week's topic. 

I immediately thought of Disorientation when reading the article "Literary Hoaxes and the Ethics of Authorship". When discussing why someone might lie about who they are, Menand (2018) writes, "The key here is the power differential between the hoaxer and the fake persona. The hoaxer has cultural capital. He or she is already a writer, someone who understands how the publishing world works. The marginalized or exotic subjects they pretend to be have cultural capital, too, in the sense that people want to buy their books and read their stories. But they have fewer means with which to cash out that capital. So the hoaxer steps in." The hoaxer is capitalizing off of stories that are not their own and often has the means to do so. Menand (2018) then goes on to write, "What may seem harder to account for is that the hoaxes are rarely detected by people who are from those communities or know something about them. But these readers, too, have a stake in the believability of the book’s authorship. They want quality works coming out of their cultures." This brought me back to Disorientation and how critics of Xiao-Wen Chou would say that his work was pandering to a white audience. 

My takeaway from this week's readings and prompt is that these literary hoaxes can bring about a great deal of harm to readers. The hoaxers are writing about experiences that are not theirs to tell. Readers may feel as if they have been cheated or lied to thus wasting their time and money on something fake. It can also lead to harm done to the marginalized communities the hoaxer is writing about. This includes perpetuating harmful stereotypes and speaking over marginalized voices. 

So how does this affect us as librarians? I think it highlights the importance of knowing about the author behind the book. I try to research authors before I read their books to have a basic understanding of who they are. I am not perfect so I don't always do this but it is something I try to be aware of before picking up a new to me author. Being knowledgeable on these topics, or even knowing what to look for, will help us inform readers as well. 

References

Menand, L. (2018). Literary hoaxes and the ethics of authorship. The New           

Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/literary-hoaxes-and-the-ethics-of-authorship