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Hochstapler geben vor, jemand zu sein, der sie nicht sind. Sie konstruieren eine Lebensgeschichte, die sich bestimmter kultureller Vorannahmen und Stereotype bedient, um für andere glaubhaft zu sein. Doch ist Identität nicht stets auch Produkt eines erzählerischen Selbstentwurfs? Am Beispiel von wahren und imaginierten Fällen von Betrügern in Nordamerika fragen die Beiträge des Bandes nach den Motiven von Hochstapelei, den Mechanismen der Täuschung – und warum diese funktionieren. Acknowledgments The present volume results from an international symposium held at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena in April 2012, which most of the con-tributors attended. We are grateful to the Leipzig Consulate, the GKS, and the Alumni Association of Friedrich-Schiller University Jena for issuing publication grants which made this book possible at a time of economic austerity, and to Canadian indigenous writer Drew Hayden Taylor, whose short fictional piece truly embellishes this academic publication. We would particularly like to thank Mareike Dolata for her enthusiasm and tireless efforts in helping to edit this volume. Jena, December 2013Caroline Rosenthal and Stefanie Schäfer Introduction Caroline Rosenthal and Stefanie Schäfer In 2008, after a spectacular thirty years of successfully impersonating other identities, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter from Siegsdorf in Bavaria was discovered to be an impostor. The Bavarian had continuously reinvented himself in personas of ever increasing social status. He was, among others, Chris Gerhart, an affluent American; the thirteenth Baron of Chichester and descendant of the famous sailor; and finally became James Frederick Mills Clark Rockefeller, art collector, Wall Street trader, and a descendant of the famous American oil magnate. He married a rich businesswoman who divorced him twelve years later when she began to suspect that he was not who he pretended to be. Gerhartsreiter/Rockefeller's sham was only exposed when he kidnapped his seven year old daughter and became the subject of a manhunt on the American East Coast. Table of Contents Acknowledgments9 Introduction11 Caroline Rosenthal and Stefanie Schäfer Faking It: Real Impostors and the Fabrication of Identities The Message Becomes the Messenger: Jonathan Carver's Travels between Imposture and Nationalist Self-Fashioning27 Ramin Djahazi 'The Wish to be a Red Indian': The Canadian Dream of Grey Owl45 Caroline Rosenthal The Curious Case of Asa Carter and The Education of Little Tree62 Laura Browder The Impostor as Trickster as Innovator: A Re-Reading of Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan Cycle81 Stefan Löchle Making the Fake: Fake Identities in Literature, Film, and TV "You Do an Awfully Good Impression of Yourself": Authorial Impostors in Contemporary American Fiction99 Jan D. Kucharzewski Reading Fiction under False Assumptions? Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins and her Posthumous Passing for Black111 Yulia Kozyrakis Unwilling Impostors, Willing Victims: Passing in Two Nineteenth-Century Cuban Novels126 Victor Goldgel From Rinehartism to Capgras: Imposture and the American Dream143 Christian Knirsch Watch Me If You Can: The Return of the Impostor in Contemporary Film159 Wieland Schwanebeck The Con Man and the Close-Up: Imposture in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood175 Martin Holtz "A Man is Whatever Room He's in": Identity, Home, and Nostalgia in AMC's Mad Men190 Stefanie Mueller AlterNatives?-A Coda Identity Joyriding with the Trickster in Drew Hayden Taylor's Motorcycles & Sweetgrass211 Maryann Henck Pretending to Be an Impostor 227 Drew Hayden Taylor Contributors231 Index2344... Caroline Rosenthal ist Professorin für amerikanische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft an der Universität Jena. Stefanie Schäfer, Dr. phil., ist dort wissenschaftliche Assistentin.
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