Courses

This course traces the recurrence of the con artist in American fiction. Focusing largely on nineteenth century texts, we'll use classic con artist characters to help identify the ways con artists unsettle the categories of identity, truth, and nature. But this course focuses not only on the genuine article (the scoundrels who earn your confidence and intimacy in order to rob you blind) but also on novels featuring characters wrongfully accused of deception because they can pass between multiple social types. What is threatening about these figures? We'll look at the ways tricksters make use of their environments in Contact, Abolitionist, and Southern literature to question what might be ontologically at stake when a person dissembles. Finally, we turn to three novels about passing to examine how the con artist haunts these narratives, and how the threat of being accused of running a con shapes the formal and theoretical richness these novels contain.