Catfishing

By Ilan Stavans. A recent classroom experience left me with the exhilarating feeling of having found a new word usage, barely a few years old, that has become a fixture in how we approach the world. This semester I’ve been teaching a course called “Impostors” that focuses on actors, spies, forgers, translators, plagiarizers, and other transgressors assuming someone else’s identity for commercial, political, psychological, artistic, or other purposes. Students read Plato, Diderot, Cervantes, and Freud, watch movies like Woody Allen’s Zelig and Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, and read classics like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. More...