Word: lindberg
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...CONFIDENCE MAN IN AMERICAN LITERATURE by Gary Lindberg; Oxford; 319 pages...
...artists are familiar figures in American literature, though they are usually directed through culture's back door. Their calling card was written by a 19th century popular comic character named Simon Suggs: "It is good to be shifty in a new country." Gary Lindberg's elaborate study The Confidence Man in American Literature, uses Suggs and his cronies as models to examine the national character. The task requires the assistance of that old critical handyman, ambivalence...
...news that public condemnation of the con man is mixed with private admiration for his sting. More than 50 years ago, V.L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought noted that the sharpster appealed to the hidden desires of an otherwise hardworking, pious people. Lindberg considers the ambivalent attitude to be not hypocrisy but rather a theoretical expression of American genius. A con man may impoverish widows and orphans, but he cannot do so without first creating confidence. And confidence, says the author, who is a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, is what America...
Many a used car and intellectual lemon have been sold with his formula. Lindberg does not label Poe a confidence man but a "New World technician." Yet tech man and con man are related by method. Writes Lindberg: "When the New World technician reduces complex process to duplicable parts, he provides the model by which the con man reduces another's gestures to imitable steps and dissects habits of belief so as to manipulate them...
...procedure amounts to an elaborate game. One of the great players was Benjamin Franklin, whom Lindberg hails as America's classic "do-it-yourself Self." Popular history tells a rags-to-riches tale that parallels the birth of the nation. History is not incorrect, though Franklin's Autobiography and his how-to text The Way to Wealth reveal a great practitioner of situation ethics. His affable description of "one of the first errata of my life" cannot disguise that he employed a highhanded scheme to break his legal obligation to complete an apprenticeship at his brother...