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Part of
The Discursive Construction of Identities On- and Offline: Personal - group - collective
Edited by Birte Bös, Sonja Kleinke, Sandra Mollin and Nuria Hernández
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 78] 2018
► pp. 15–56

Great pretenders

The phenomenon of impersonating (pseudo-)historical personae in medieval blogs, or: Blogging for someone else’s fame?

| Leopold-Franzens University Innsbruck
This paper deals with the contradictory phenomenon of fake profiles within the blogosphere, i.e. blogger profiles that are overtly fictional in specific. We encounter these in the medieval weblog Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, launched in 2006 by Brantley Bryant, then Associate Professor of Medieval Literature at Sonoma State University. During the interaction with other users within the boundaries of this blog, Bryant impersonates the late 14th century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and creates pseudo-personal narratives that blend in both pieces of his real-life professional self as well as his pseudo-self (henceforth LeVostreGC). The main tool employed by himself and other users in playing the roles of (fictional) historical personae so as to uphold the fictional sphere and roleplay is the shared language code of pseudo-archaic English.
This paper discusses how the co-bloggers form a community of practice (CoP), while they enjoy both the privacy and the secrecy of the medieval blog. The fact that participants need very specific, historio-linguistic knowledge in order to access this community (and ‘play the game’) contributes immensely to the makeup and behavior within it: the community reinforces its members’ identities as medievalists and values their command of knowledge generally perceived as arcane outside the community. As shall be argued, the language code(s) employed in the blog are the key to entering and acting within this CoP.
Keywords: fictional profile, fake profile, pseudo-archaism, Middle English, community of practice, self, (un)authenticity, bald-faced lying, Geoffrey Chaucer
Article outline
  • 1.Framing the objective
  • 2.Browsing through relevant notions and frameworks
    • 2.1Fake and fiction
    • 2.2Stylization and (in)authenticity
    • 2.3A role-playing community of practice
  • 3. Blog, what art thou? – Assessing the surface levels of Chaucer’s Blog
    • 3.1A medieval blog with (un)conventional features
    • 3.2Arrangement of blog components in Chaucer’s Blog
    • 3.3Some obvious oddities and idiosyncrasies of Chaucer’s Blog on the surface content levels
  • 4.Framing the ‘pretenders’: Medieval aficionados, role-playing metagamers and fun “hunch-backed keepers of a dark culture and age”?
    • 4.1Fan fiction, fictional personae and merged identities in the blogosphere
    • 4.2Breaking down the ‘langage’: Pseudo-personae writing pseudo-archaic English
  • 5.A brief conclusion regarding intentional frame breaks, or: Blogging for one’s own fame after all (?)
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 23 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.78.02kir
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