Meetings of the Masks

Abstract From Rabelais to Pessoa and beyond, novelists and poets have often dressed themselves in alternative identities; it’s less often been observed that scholars have periodically done so too. In this paper, I am going to explore the dialectics of self-display and concealment in the realm of literary and cultural criticism, using David Damrosch’s 2000 novel Meetings of the Mind as my starting point. Playful and metatextual, it features four very different scholars, the author’s anagrammatic alter egos, engaging in lively cultural and theoretical debates at a series of comparative literature conferences. My article aims to track down the genealogy of such self-refashioning quests among scholars, with particular focus on the examples of Matthew Arnold and Mikhail Bakhtin. Tracing their influence on Damrosch’s thinking, I will argue that doubles and masks can be effective critical tools for challenging both social constructs and our own ideas.