Wendy Doniger: Self-Imitation in Ancient India, Shakespeare, and Hollywood

Presidential Lecturer

Wendy Doniger considered stories from the mythology of self-impersonation in which people who set out to become other people, through a kind of triple cross, or double back, end up masquerading as themselves, a motif that Doniger sees as having broad cultural implications for how we negotiate reality, illusion, identity, and authenticity, not to mention memory, amnesia, and the process of aging.