Abstract
In her groundbreaking monograph Authenticity and the Public Literary Self: Will the ‘Real’ Author Please Stand Up, Sreedhevi Iyer explores how authors navigate contemporary literary discourse both online and off by constructing literary personae which are perceived to be authentic. Within the field of literary studies, Iyer locates two major obstacles to an author’s enactment of their real self; firstly, the tendency to conflate an author with their texts creates an expectancy for authors ‘to enact a discursively recognizable self in line with their literary product’ (2023: 5); secondly, there is an assumption that, as a public figure within a celebrity culture, an author must perform a credible persona who can ‘contribute significantly to contemporary cultural conversation’ (2023: 5). Iyer illustrates how, under capitalistic market forces, an author’s currency depends upon their ability to perform authenticity, and yet a curated version of self-expression becomes problematic when authors are seen to deviate from their core brand. Through a series of case studies which focus upon canonized authors Junot Diaz, Mohsin Hamid and Madeleine Thien, Iyer demonstrates the particular burden faced by authors who are expected ‘to portray themselves as ethnically authentic’ (2023: 8) or else face ostracism. While Iyer’s publication is of great importance as the first monograph focusing on how authors of color negotiate public literary discourse, this research has implications for other marginalized authors who are expected to publicly perform a persona and politics that allies with the expectations of social actors including agents, publishers, readers and reviewers. The analytical frameworks that Iyer sets out would particularly be useful when discussing authors who write in the context of lived experience with disability, neurodivergence and/or mental health conditions, whose ‘authentic’ public personas do not always align with expectations/stereotypes.
In the introduction, Iyer explains Gregory Bateson’s double bind theory as a Catch-22, where ‘as a participant in the relationship, you create a context when you act, but you must then also act according to the rules set in that context’ (2023: 10). Applying this ‘double tension’ (2023: 10) to the epitexts of acclaimed authors Diaz, Hamid and Thien, Iyer’s research makes visible the impossibility of fulfilling the discursive requirement for literary authenticity according to market demand. Where Bateson’s use of the term transcontextual makes obvious ‘the tangle of rules and social behavior’ (2023: 11) and the ‘breach in the contextual structure’ (2023: 10) that characterize the double bind, Iyer extends his theory to illustrate the paradox of performed authenticity within the literary sphere. Iyer introduces the term transcontextual writers as a way to move beyond the essentializing descriptor authors of color, while still acknowledging the complexity of performing intersecting axes of identity on a global stage. In the conclusion, Iyer offers a succinct definition of transcontextual writers as ‘authors experiencing and creating the context within which they function as they interact and such experience rendering that context manifest and visible’ (2023: 173). The breadth of this term invites a spectrum of applications for use within literary studies and sociolinguistics.
In Chapter 2, Iyer traces the notion of ‘authenticity’ throughout history, as a philosophy and a social construct. Iyer finds that within today’s identity politics, authors are expected to weaponize their marginality—or else risk being seen as ‘sellouts and privileged (and therefore eligible to be canceled)’ (2023: 28)—effectively essentializing ‘authenticity’ to satisfy market or political demands. Avoiding such a reductionist view, Iyer considers how within the field of sociolinguistics “authenticity” is an interactional accomplishment achieved through language use across different platforms, forming a negotiated construct rather than a fixed entity’ (2023: 32). Discourse analysis offers multiple frameworks through which Iyer is able to ‘examine how an author’s persona is discursively constructed through commonly held audience perceptions with regard to the participant in question’ (2023: 33). Rather than analyze her case studies’ primary works, Iyer takes particular interest in each author’s public epitexts in order to evaluate the author’s perceived ‘authenticity’ within literary discourse. Although Iyer specifically chooses not to do close readings of her case studies’ primary texts, it would be an intriguing exercise to assign undergraduate or masters-level students comparative readings between Diaz, Hamid and Thien’s fictive texts alongside the epitextual utterances which comprise Iyer’s data.
In Chapter 3, Iyer introduces the subjects of her case studies, each of whom she gained access to through a literary community that she was a part of as an alumnus of the prestigious City University Hong Kong MFA program. ‘As a writer of varied cultural, linguistic, and geographical particularity’ (2023: 58), Iyer’s positionality granted her insider status among her case studies, each of whom have ‘experienced life as an ethnic minority within a country different to their own and which is the dominant paradigm in which they communicate as writers’ (2023: 58). Data collection involved semi-structured interviews, the case studies’ (pre-X) Twitter feeds and supplementary data such as reviews, published interviews and correspondence. In order to locate tropes that center upon authorial ‘authenticity’, Iyer analyzed articles from The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books and streamlined the results into four predominant features of an ‘authentic’ author. These metapragmatic stereotypes or typifications include: ‘an eccentric persona’ (2023: 65), ‘an awareness of literary craft’ (2023: 65), ‘a social role as a public intellectual, positioned outside capitalistic ideals’ (2023: 65) and ‘a persona in alignment with the literary work produced’ (2023: 65). Through these indexical stereotypes, Iyer provides us an analytical framework applicable to all authors who maintain a public presence through social media, interviews and/or appearances. Particularly fascinating, and of relevance also to PR and social media studies, is a section which unpacks the paradoxes of tweeting and online networking. In this online space an author is pressured to present an ‘authentic’ version of self, which is actually an edited ‘version that has been pre-planned and pre-vetted’ (2023: 75). This paradoxically can ‘limit the kind of subject matter they could post about without running into the danger of seeming inauthentic to their online audience’ (2023: 76).
In Chapters 4, 5 and 6—‘Pigeonholing,’ ‘Narrowing of discourse’ and ‘The paradox of authenticity’—Iyer evaluates each of her case studies’ ‘authenticity’ using the four metapragmatic stereotypes described above. Quite provocative and entertaining are the extracts from Iyer’s interviews with her subjects and the subsequent analyses, especially where Iyer catches her subjects evading the implications of her questions, only for them to reframe the questions in ways they feel it is acceptable to accede to. We witness at play a constant re-negotiation of identity by the case-study authors, whose strategy for styling ‘authenticity’ sometimes includes subverting the indexical stereotypes. One example of this is where Iyer asks Mohsin Hamid—author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)—what the implications are for contemporary authors who might try to ‘be teachers like old poets, especially from the East, who have been regarded as dangerous’ (2023: 144). Initially, Hamid argues against the interviewer by positioning himself as a student rather than a teacher, distancing himself from the idea of being a ‘dangerous’ teacher; he finally concedes, ‘[…] yes I would say, there is a role’ (2023: 144). Iyer notes that Hamid’s ‘leaning on a divergent stance but actually being congruent with it’ (2023: 145) is representative of Hamid’s internal negotiation with himself as much as with his interviewer; Iyer understands that ‘the intention of the person who speaks in ways that can accommodate paradoxical elements is probably the most “authentic” demonstration of that personhood’ (2023: 169). Despite Iyer’s affinity for the authors who comprise her study, she does not shy from controversial material. Iyer discusses author Junot Diaz’s conflation with the consistent narrator of his books, a misogynistic character named Yunior. This assumption that author and narrator are equivalent is perpetuated by ‘the similarity of the narrative voice—the way Diaz speaks, his ‘orality’’ (2023: 126). Without casting judgment on the #MeToo controversy in which Diaz was accused of sexual misconduct, Iyer questions whether ‘the controversy would have occurred, and to this extent, if Diaz’s works were not full of examinations of masculinity’ (2023: 121). Through close readings of Diaz’s response to published interviews, Iyer explicates the ways in which Diaz exposes the ‘linguistic “cage”’ (2023: 131) surrounding his ‘authenticity’, trapping him ‘within its paradoxical boundaries’ (2023: 115).
As a tool for use in the creative writing workshop space, Iyer’s thought-provoking monograph would provide an academically rich accompaniment to Felicia Rose Chavez’s popular pedagogical guide The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom (2021). While the theoretical underpinnings of Authenticity and the Public Literary Self are brimming with citations that signal its intention for a more scholarly audience than Chavez’s guidebook, Iyer’s grounding of high theory in real-world examples and case studies makes her work accessible and fun. Using excerpts from Iyer’s monograph in undergraduate classrooms—whether in creative writing, sociolinguistics or media studies—would provoke lively discussions due to its contemporary lens which takes social media, the 24-hour news cycle and identity politics into account when considering the pressures and paradoxes of constructing an authentic authorial self.
