To All, I have an unorthodox request: What book would you recommend me on the theme of ‘authenticity’? Ideally a novel, but any type of creative and narrative text would do.
I’m asking because I am enrolled in a ‘Literature and Philosophy’ class — and it is a requirement of our term paper that we crowdsource book recommendations from algorithms, peers and strangers. Notwithstanding what we (and I !) have said lately about the quality of education, there are still innovative professors with worthwhile agendas in the classrooms.
Thank you so much for your suggestions and I’m looking forward to them!
More on what I mean with ‘Authencity’ for this paper:
Authenticity is an important contemporary ideal, yet there remains extensive confusion about what authenticity is, what it ‘looks like’ and how it ‘feels like’ as a lived experience. Can literature help elucidate this inquiry? Can a work of literature provide an example of authenticity? If in a fictional work, what can we make of the nuance between ‘truth’ to authenticity? In creative non-fiction (such as memoirs), is the literary work describing the authenticity of the lived life, or is the literary work ‘constructing’ — consciously or unconsciously — an ‘authentic’ persona in some way? (This pertains to the idea that story-telling tends to play an important role in identity formation (ie. we explain ourselves to ourselves as well as to others through stories…))
I would recommend two books, though both a little different than what you may be expecting. The first, “Kenny and the Dragon” by Tony DiTerlizzi is technically a children’s book. Nevertheless, it is, at its core, about authenticity. The second book, “Handmade: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction” by Gary Rogowski is loosely about the life of a professional woodworker, but again, to me its a great example of one man discovering who and why he is.
Hi Matte, Thank you so much for the recommendations. I love that both are of such different genres. I looked into book and will get ‘Handmade’, especially since I am sure I will identify so much — working wood myself!