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"Self-deception Fiction."
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Reply all : stories
\"Reply All, the third collection of award-winning and widely anthologized short stories by Robin Hemley, takes a humorous, edgy, and frank look at the human art of deception and self-deception. A father accepts, without question, the many duplicate saint relics that appear in front of his cave everyday; a translator tricks Magellan by falsely translating a local chief's words of welcome; an apple salesman a long way from home thinks he's fallen in love; a search committee believes in its own nobility by hiring a minority writer; a cheating couple broadcast their affair to an entire listserv; a talk show host interviews the dead and hopes to learn their secrets. The ways in which humans fool themselves are infinite, and while these stories illustrate this sad fact in sometimes excruciating detail, the aim is not to skewer the misdirected, but to commiserate with them and blush in recognition.\"--P. [4] of cover.
Book
The Art of Guilt and Self-Division: Anaïs Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love
Anaïs Nin’s semi-autobiographical novel, A Spy in the House of Love (1954), subjectivizes the physical experience of a wife’s infidelities while personifying the mental terrors of her guilt by means of a male figure: The Lie Detector. Embarked on a tournée of self-discovery, Sabina is an offstage actress who aestheticizes her adulterous affairs in a sophisticated art of self-division, whereby she intermittently plays the roles of a Byronic Doña Juana and a melodramatic Emma Bovary to continue to cherish her sexual freedom with many lovers, without losing the protection of her fatherly husband. Although guilt is part of Sabina’s artifice, the real risk inherent in her self-divisions and self-contradictions as a result of her infidelities, is to lose herself in her own lies and to fail to find her true identity beyond the Cubist canvas of her fragmented selves.
Journal Article
I'm an old commie!
\"Emilia, a pensioner in northern Romania, is forced to confront the nostalgic illusions she nurtures as a reaction to the grim post-communist present when her daughter, now living in Canada, telephones urging her not to vote for the former communists in upcoming elections. Determined to discover in her own mind why 'things were better back then,' she explores her memories of growing up in an impoverished village and of her life as a factory worker in the town. But ironic tension grows as the reader glimpses between the lines how nothing was what it seemed in Ceau÷sescu's Romania. Interspersed among Emilia's memories are fantastical, hilarious anecdotes about the dictator, told by a factory foreman who will turn out to have been a secret police informer. I'm a Communist Old Biddy! is a subtle and humane novel about self-deception, but also about the ways in which a totalitarian state twisted ordinary lives\" -- Provided by publisher.
Book
Trying Not to Lie...and Failing: Autoethnography, Memory, Malleability
All research is experiential, whether this is the experience of reading in the library or observing in the field. Autoethnographers take experience into narratives and are themselves key participants in their research, and often also its subject. For autoethnographers the idea of research as a neutral process is abandoned in favour of a self-reflective form that explores the researcher's perspective on the subject in question. Autoethnography inevitably negotiates the relationship between the stories we want to tell and the histories we have lived through; between the necessary fictions of publication/presentation and the real world experiences we draw upon. This article questions whether we can ever tell our experiences truthfully. This article questions what it might mean to write oneself into research findings and narrative reports, and it asks what happens when one's self goes further and becomes the research. It offers perspectives and provocations which are informed but not bound by autoethnography's extant body of thought and readers are invited on a brief journey through self-writing as it relates to the vagaries of memory and the illusion of truth.
Journal Article
Song for the unraveling of the world : stories
\"A newborn's absent face appears on the back of someone else's head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he's after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a troubled patient's room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most inhuman impulses--whether we know it or not\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Political Hypocrisy
What kind of hypocrite should voters choose as their next leader? The question seems utterly cynical. But, as David Runciman suggests, it is actually much more cynical to pretend that politics can ever be completely sincere.Political Hypocrisyis a timely, and timeless, book on the problems of sincerity and truth in politics, and how we can deal with them without slipping into hypocrisy ourselves. Runciman draws on the work of some of the great truth-tellers in modern political thought--Hobbes, Mandeville, Jefferson, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Orwell--and applies his ideas to different kinds of hypocritical politicians from Oliver Cromwell to Hillary Clinton. He argues that we should accept hypocrisy as a fact of politics--the most dangerous form of political hypocrisy is to claim to have a politics without hypocrisy. Featuring a new foreword that takes the story up to Donald Trump, this book examines why, instead of vainly searching for authentic politicians, we should try to distinguish between harmless and harmful hypocrisies and worry only about the most damaging varieties.
eBook
The Self-Deceiving Muse: Fiction and the Rationalistic Dictates of the Present
[...]we are bound to conclude that self-deception-the epitome of irrationality-rationalizes the longevity of the genre as a métier of human self-understanding. [...]the man who wishes to see himself as not a cuckold will gather evidence from his observations of his wife's behavior quite selectively. Since Bach accepts that our attention is always inadequate to a range of relevant evidence available it makes less sense to stigmatize a self-deceiver's behavior as irrational than to grant the rationalistic dynamics by which evidence becomes accessible to an agent. [...]to be present is to open the perspective that knowledge of self-deception is a normative duty of what Audi calls \"conscientious consciousness\" (150). If, as I've suggested in my reading of Flaubert, the novel has \"long harbored a notion of character that has resisted characterization\" it might be fitting to conclude with a quick survey of novelists for whom this notion portends a convergence of ethical obligation and aesthetic innovation. Since I have made self-deception a predicate of such a characterization of the novel, as well as the characters it harbors, I would take Samuel Beckett, John Hawkes, and Joseph McElroy as exemplary practitioners of the novel for whom knowing is an expressly transitive burden of narrating.
Journal Article
The Shadow of a Lie: Poetry, Lying, and the Truth of Fictions
Poets are liars to some degree, combining artistic imagination and self-deceptive distortions of the truth. Weaving the truth into a larger fictional context distinguishes genres, such as romance literature. Unwitting falsehoods by the author are commonly accepted, while intentional exaggerations ring of fabricated tales. The shadow of a lie surrounds poetry and the dreamy partly-hidden quality of it.
Journal Article
