AustLit

'The paper suggests that in an environment saturated in simulation, the notion of documentary truth has become precarious. It argues in favour of a 'performative hermeneutics' as a heuristic tool to counter this challenge of fakery and simulation. Starting from an overview of numerous examples of fakes as strategic interventions in the aesthetic field, the paper focuses on Ern Malley, the best investigated and most debated literary hoax in Australia, performed in 1944. In order to contextualise the Ern Malley case, this essay portrays two kinds of dialogue with the hoax, one textual (New Criticism, deconstruction), and one contextual (cultural hermeneutics, discourse analysis, systems theory, sociology of culture, post-colonial studies). Peter Carey's fictionalised version (My Life as a Fake, 2003) is employed to expose the various merits and pitfalls of critical approaches to the Ern Malley case. Eventually, this metacritical review focuses on the theory of performativity (Fischer-Lichte) and singles out an approach tentatively called 'performative hermeneutics' as the most promising approach to an analysis of faking and hoaxing. The author proposes that we cultivate a hermeneutics of generalised cultural suspicion, a suspicion of one's own heuristic apparatus as much as a suspicion of expert culture.' (Abstract from publisher's website http://www.zaa.uni-tuebingen.de/?attachment_id=401 )