MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | HYPERBOLE: SENSE, SENSATION, SPECTACLE

The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News

May 6 @ 6 P.M.
Beckham Hall

Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young’s lecture will revisit the rogue’s gallery of hoaxers, plagiarists, forgers, and fakers examined in his book Bunk, which traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon. Woven from stereotype and suspicion, he argues, race is the most insidious American hoax of all. P.T Barnum came to fame by displaying as side-shows figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and an African American man he professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution. Tracing the long history of hoaxing from the 18th century to the present, Young asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of “truthiness” where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art.

Co-sponsored by the Writing Certificate, the Office for Equity and Inclusion, the Center for the Arts, the Dean of Arts and Humanities, the College of Letters, the Center for the Americas, the English Department, the History Department, the Government Department, the African American Studies Program and the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.