| Fake It: Fictions of Forgery. University of Virginia Press, 2021.
How many layers of artifice can one artwork contain? How does forgery unsettle our notions of originality and creativity? Looking at both the literary and art worlds, Fake It investigates a set of fictional forgeries and hoaxes alongside their real-life inspirations and parallels. Mark Osteen shows how any forgery or hoax is only as good as its authenticating story—and demonstrates how forgeries foster fresh authorial identities while being deeply intertextual and frequently quite original. From fakes of the late eighteenth century, such as Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley poems and the notorious “Shakespearean” documents fabricated by William-Henry Ireland, to hoaxes of the modern period, such as Clifford Irving’s fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, the infamous Ern Malley forgeries, and the audacious authorial masquerades of Percival Everett, Osteen lays bare provocative truths about the conflicts between aesthetic and economic value. In doing so he illuminates the process of artistic creation, which emerges as collaborative and imitative rather than individual and inspired, revealing that authorship is, to some degree, always forged.
“Lively, accessible, perceptive, witty, informative, and entertaining. Osteen’s research and scholarship are impeccable. The book offers an excellent gloss on postmodernist pastiche through the lens of ‘forgery fictions’—stories about forgery that often verge on, or cross entirely over to, the status of forgeries themselves. –Margaret Russett, University of Southern California, author of Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845. “With Fake It, Mark Osteen marches up to the church of forgery and nails his 15 theses to the door. Who knew there were still so many pieties about literary forgery to unsettle? Fake It is our most comprehensive, clear-eyed, and provocative account yet of imposture’s relation to narrative and fictionality.” –Paul K. Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania. Purchase from University of Virginia Press. ————————————————————————————————————————- The Beatles through a Glass Onion: Reconsidering the White Album
This volume treats the White Album as a whole, with essays scrutinizing it from a wide range of perspectives. These essays place the album within the social and political context of a turbulent historical moment; locate it within the Beatles’ lives and careers, taking into consideration the complex personal forces at play during the recording sessions; investigate the musical as well as pharmaceutical influences on the record; reveal how it reflects new developments in the Beatles’ songwriting and arranging; revisit the question of its alleged disunity; and finally, track its legacy and the breadth of its influence on later rock, pop, and hip-hop artists. As the first essay collection focusing on the White Album, The Beatles through a Glass Onion represents a landmark work of rock music scholarship. It will prove to be an essential and enduring contribution to the field. ———————————————————————————————————- Hitchcock and Adaptation: On the Page and Screen
From early silent features like The Lodger and Easy Virtue to his final film, Family Plot, in 1976, most of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies were adapted from plays, novels, and short stories. Hitchcock collaborated with those who would not just execute his vision but shape it, and many of the screenwriters he enlisted–including Eliot Stannard, Charles Bennett, John Michael Hayes, and Ernest Lehman–worked with the director more than once. And of course Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, his most constant collaborator, was with him from the 1920s until his death. In Hitchcock and Adaptation: On the Page and Screen, Mark Osteen has assembled a wide-ranging collection of essays that explore how Hitch and his screenwriters transformed literary and theatrical sources into masterpieces of cinema. Some of the essays view adaptations through a specific lens, such as Queer aesthetics in Rope, Strangers on a Train, and Psycho, while others investigate Hitchcock as author, auteur, adapter and, for the first time, as a literary source. Films discussed in this volume include Sabotage, The 39 Steps, Shadow of a Doubt, Lifeboat, Rear Window, Vertigo, Marnie, and Frenzy. The final set of essays analyzes Hitchcock-inspired works by W. G. Sebald, Don DeLillo, and Bret Easton Ellis, among others. These close examinations of Alfred Hitchcock and the creative process illuminate the significance of the material to which he turned for inspiration, celebrate the men and women who helped to bring his vision from the page to the screen, and explore how the director has influenced contemporary writers. A fascinating look into an underexplored aspect of the director’s working methods, Hitchcock and Adaptation will be of interest to film scholars and fans of cinema’s most gifted auteur. _________________________________________________________________ Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream Desperate young lovers on the lam (They Live by Night), a cynical con man making a fortune as a mentalist (Nightmare Alley), a penniless pregnant girl mistaken for a wealthy heiress (No Man of Her Own), a wounded veteran who has forgotten his own name (Somewhere in the Night)—this gallery of film noir characters challenges the stereotype of the wise-cracking detective and the alluring femme fatale. Despite their differences, they have something in common: a belief in self-reinvention. Nightmare Alley is a thorough examination of how film noir disputes this notion at the heart of the American Dream. Central to many of these films, Mark Osteen argues, is the story of an individual trying, by dint of hard work or, more often, illicit enterprise, to overcome his or her origins and achieve material success. In the wake of World War II, film noir tested the dream of upward mobility and the ideas of individuality, liberty, equality, and free enterprise and accompany it. Employing an array of theoretical perspectives (including psychoanalysis, art history, feminism, and music theory), while combining close reading with original primary source research, Nightmare Alley proves both the diversity and potency of classic noir. This provocative and wide-ranging study revises and refreshing our understanding of noir’s characters, themes, and cultural significance. “Only a few of the many books on noir are essential. This is one of them.” —Choice “Mark Osteen manages to add something new and substantial to the discourse on film noir—an examination of the ways in which the American dream is subverted, challenged, and ultimately discounted by the harsh realities of a noir universe, which more directly aligns itself with society than with the phantom hope of endless upward mobility.” —Wheeler Winston Dixon, University of Nebraska. _________________________________________________________________
Praise for the book: “A brave dad’s honest diary of raising a son with severe autism who has difficulty learning basic skills. It should be read by psychologists, family therapists, and others who are helping families to cope.”– Temple Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism “Osteen writes with candor…occasionally heartbreaking, at times darkly humorous.” Publishers Weekly “In this remarkable and honest memoir, Mark Osteen chronicles the complexities of raising a child with autism. His family struggles with how to think about, and speak about, emotions so tender and powerful that even the joys of Cameron’s incremental victories are fragile. Happiness, for Osteen, is a “quartz contentment,” in Emily Dickinson’s unusual phrase, protected inside, like a stone. In the inspiring conclusion of this masterful book, Osteen and his wife come to terms with their feelings as they begin to see Cameron as an individual, rather than an extension of themselves. The ironic and inspiring conclusion is that parents of a child with a disability, not only the child, ultimately need to stand alone and find their own identities.”—Roy Richard Grinker, author of Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism and Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University |
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Mark Osteen's Personal Website
Professor of Literature, Author, & Musician
One of Us: A Family’s Life with Autism
Mark Osteen's Personal Website 