ABSTRACT
Authenticity, as I will argue in this chapter, is best grasped within the context of a distinct modern culture of emotion-principally Romantic in its origins and development-where feelings and emotions speak to us about who we are, telling us the most vital things about ourselves. Authenticity, in this sense, is a particular language of the self, an intensely sentimental (i.e., suffused with emotion) type of discourse; it is a way of speaking about who I am, my identity, which in its modern manifestation is an intense experience (and pursuit) of myself as I truly am. In what follows, as I develop these ideas about authenticity today and its continuity with its emotional and sentimental past, I examine how authenticity has been changed and intensified by contemporary media culture and how in a thoroughly mediasaturated world the pursuit of authenticity-and the dramatization of the real vs. the fake, the natural vs. fabricated, the “real article” vs. the phony-has become a cultural preoccupation. Indeed, “popular culture is obsessed with authenticity and awash with artificiality,” as Mukerji (2007:1) has convincingly argued and this “obsession” is played out in a number of highly visible and intensely emotional cultural practices, from the world of sports, leisure, and entertainment to those of religion and politics.
