By design, this column type will be open to anyone who wants to comment, because I’m keen to hear suggestions of other materials!
Prologue: On Course Design.
What I’m going to be doing in this column is sketching out an imagined syllabus, often of a class that I’m never going to teach. I probably have about 10-12 years of teaching ahead of me before retirement, which is actually a very finite number of future courses (somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 or so). I’m more restless than many of my colleagues when it comes to course offerings, teaching what I’ve come to think of as “pop-up” classes just once, to get a handle on a particular topic and see how much purchase it has with contemporary students. So in a given year, I’m generally going to be teaching at least one new class. However, when I come across a new idea or a body of scholarship and general writing that I hadn’t thought about before (or even on reflection about one I know well) one of the ways I process thinking about it is to sketch out a possible syllabus—so I end up with a lot of “maybe classes” that I’ll never teach, some of which I should never even think of teaching.
A syllabus is different than a bibliography (annotated or otherwise) because it’s not a comprehensive list of references on a subject. It’s arranged in some kind of sequence where the readings and topics speak to one another, build in a particular direction, create a sense of knowledge about a subject but also a sense of how that subject matter relates to the interests of the person using the syllabus. It’s a teaching list, which is why it’s a powerful genre for folks making collaborative online responses to a crisis, event or problem—new people can add an ingredient to a sort of auto-didactical stone soup and it still keeps on teaching new readers (rather than serving as evidence of one writer’s authoritative command over a subject). Making a syllabus is thus really useful when you’re just learning about a topic, not just when you know it well. I recommend it as an exercise for anybody, not just professors or teachers.
I have a somewhat conventional structure I turn to for a lot of maybe-courses that I don’t think many of my colleagues in the discipline of history care for. I really like taking a topic that potentially has a universal or global history and making a syllabus that covers that whole ground and tries very hard to include a lot of comparative examples from different eras and societies. To cite an example I have taught multiple times, The History of Reading, where I start with classical Greek and Roman debates about reading and writing and some material on other early human ‘readerly’ cultures (China, Mesoamerica, South Asia). Often this lets me build a significant attention to African history into the class because the topic is well-represented in that scholarship (reading is a great example of that).
In truth, this course structure is something of a sleight-of-hand on my part, because I’m usually using the structure to foreground a theoretical or conceptual discussion about whether or not many concepts or histories that masquerade as universal or global are in fact modern or parochially Western—and whether thinking in terms of universals is in fact ahistorical (or just plain factually wrong). So, for example, a course I teach on the History of Leisure and Play starts with broad philosophical, psychological and evolutionary engagements with “play” but then abruptly jumps forward to the 17th Century and the emergence of “leisure” as a modern concept and practice. I do that in a ton of my course designs. I want to build epistemological “off-ramps” into my courses to help students (or anyone else) see that there may be ways to think about a topic that lead you away from historicizing it and to help them ponder for themselves whether or why they might want to go that way.
The very rough sketch of the course below in the history of “pseudocide” (faking one’s own death) follows that structure. What I think is interesting about that history, in fact, is that while it’s a relatively old theme in human cultures, it really only becomes a big deal with the rise of modern states and their ways of tracking individual identity—pseudocide is a kind of sideways entry point into other histories like the history of the passport, the history of banking, the history of the insurance industry, the history of marriage and marriage registration, and the history of individuality itself.
I got the idea because I thought idly to myself one morning as I read in the newspaper about a faked-death scheme that had been exposed that the history of faking death would be a great subject for a book. As is often the case when I have that kind of thought, I was almost immediately disappointed (and then excited) to find out that the book has (sort of) been written already: Elizabeth Greenwood, Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud. I say sort of because it’s more journalistic and contemporary than historical, but after reading it, I’m not sure there’s room for a separate book on its history as an idea and practice—Greenwood talks about a number of 19th and 20th Century cases and makes the key historicizing points that would need to come up in a historically-focused book (the role of technology, the nature of human migration, the construction of modern identity documentation).
As you go from an interest in a topic that is focused on one comprehensive book to building a syllabus of readings and materials that productively talk to one another, you also often discover that the subject matter raises some issues that you didn’t suspect or anticipate. In the context of “trigger warnings”, this turns out to be a course that would genuinely need them, which I didn’t initially suspect, in that you cannot possibly teach the history of pseudocide without also touching very substantially on the history of suicide. In psychological terms, pseudocidal ideation is very linked to suicidal ideation, and at least some actual cases (as well as literary representations of pseudocide) involve that kind of feeling—a desire to get away from existing pain, a need to express suffering so that everyone understands, a wish to see how people would feel about you when you are gone. The difference being, especially in literary or cinematic representations, that the pseudocide actually gets to fulfill those desires (much like ghosts in various cultural works from A Christmas Carol to The Lovely Bones).
Speaking of literary and cinematic examples, this is also a course that would have to be heavily weighted in that direction. The scholarly literature on pseudocide per se is not huge: a lot of the historical work I would put in a syllabus would be on the contextual issues. In real life and in art, modern pseudocide mostly concerns the following:
Suicidal ideation that leads to pseudocide instead.
Insurance fraud, often undertaken with an accomplice (which is usually what gives pseudocider away, because the accomplice doesn’t also die and goes off to live happily-ever- after with the putatively dead person).
Escaping serious debt, a burdensome civil judgment, a looming criminal indictment or long prison sentence, or losing a professional credential due to misconduct.
Getting away from a bad marriage or bad family relationships without divorce or having to deal with ongoing entanglements.
There’s also the usual questions that come up with any highly defined concept about how to deal with edge cases. Modern migration, for example, often involves some form of personal re-creation: changed names, deliberately broken ties with family and friends from the former country, efforts to hide from other people from the same place—that’s a staple both of fiction and real life. It’s not quite pseudocide but it’s close.
So here’s a rough sketch of something like a 10-week course. As I often would, I’d begin with the book that offers the most comprehensive overview of the subject to create familiarity with the subject matter.
Generally, as I work up from a sketch like this, I start adding in more scholarship or scholarly ‘infrastructure’—here I would certainly want some contemporary material on surveillance, identity, insurance, fraud and imposture overall. I usually also build a research topic that broadens the exposure of students to a particular case study—there are so so many!
The History of Pseudocide
Week 1
Elizabeth Greenwood, Playing Dead (all)
Week 2
Identification, intelligence, the state
John Torpey, The History of the Passport (selection)
Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (selection)
Jacob Soll, The Information Master (selection)
Mariam Eliav-Feldon, Renaissance Imposters and Proofs of Identity
Week 3
Early Case Studies
Pseudocide Podcast, “Bad Habits”
The Return of Martin Guerre (film)
Week 4
The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)
Week 5
Jocelyn Robson, Radical Reformers and Respectable Rebels: The Two Lives of Grace Oakeshott
Psuedocide Podcast, “The Second Life of Grace Oakeshott”, https://pseudocidepodcast.com/episodes/
Week 6
Partha Chatterjee, A Princely Imposter?
Week 7
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Week 8
Stephen Talty, Agent Garbo
Week 9
Robert Crichton, The Great Imposter (selection)
Pseudocide Podcast, “Politician, Spy, Deadman” (John Stonehouse) https://pseudocidepodcast.com/episodes/
Wife, Mother, Murderer (Audrey Marie Hilley)
Week 10-11
I am honestly torn—I want a film or TV show here that centers on a faked death and there are just way too many to choose from.
I also think I’d need a week to deal with faked deaths that have centrally involved the Internet (especially the use of digital information to unravel a faked death), plus various ‘catfishing’ cases where someone trying to deceive creates a faked death as people’s suspicions increase.
Have you listened to the Missing on 9/11 podcast, Tim? It takes on a whole lot of things—including whether the protagonist of the tale was killed at WTC, chose to walk away from her life through the medium of 9/11, is actually a missing person in the more classical sense. And how can anyone know?
Another historically significant instance: Hippolyte Bayard‘s faked self-portrait photograph as a drowned man. There’s a scholarly article about it in Modern Fiction Studies, but here’s an overview: https://www.artstor.org/2018/09/12/fake-news-the-drowning-of-hippolyte-bayard/