Issue date: 4/30/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Jim Moldenhauer / Daily Vidette Photo Editor Ron Fortune, professor of English, was the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Lecturer for their Spring Lecture Tuesday evening in the Old Main Room of the Bone Student Center.

On Tuesday night, in front of colleagues and friends, a prominent English professor recommended the appreciation and study of the act of literary forgery.

The faculty member was Ron Fortune and he was delivering the 79th lecture in the College of Arts and Science's highly regarded and prestigious series of distinguished lectures.

The lecture was entitled "Scattered Impostures: Writing and the Work of Literary Forgery". Fortune made it clear from the outset that he was not condoning the act of forgery, but merely that it was a phenomena as old as writing itself and that it has merits that need to be studied rather than dismissed.

"Forgery is a very bad thing," Fortune said. "But I always have to ask 'What aren't we seeing?' people who forge are painfully conscious that they are engaging in an active writing exercise."

The presentation began with a quote from Dante Aligheri's "The Inferno" in which a forger was placed in hell.

"Forgery is a crime," Fortune said. "But before that, it was a sin punishable by fire."

Fortune argues that forging is a skill and that it requires diligent steps to be taken in order to pass itself off as the real thing. He felt that since it is in fact a crime, scholars had largely ignored the study of this practice and that was what attracted him to it.

Fortune pointed out many trends he found in his study of forgery over the years. One was that the forgeries always had to fit inside an ever- evolving narrative.

"You had to come up with a story that would hold up to scrutiny," he said. "The narrative that you construct pertaining to your discovery of the forged document has to anticipate and adjust to those questions."

Forgery has also evolved along with technology. Ken Earl, a junior English major, is currently enrolled in Fortune's English 351 class that deals with hypertext. The students were given an assignment to recreate a webpage that was given to them.

"It was definitely a challenge because it showed the mindset that goes into creating any kind of text," Earl said. "You get into the head of a professional web developer and getting the idea of layout and sizing and everything."

The research that Fortune presented was, by his own admission, "a work in progress". The latest trend he was stumbling upon was the forgery of translations of foreign works.

"The prospect for forgery there seems huge," he said. "But I don't really have a lot of concrete evidence on that front, and that's what I'll be focusing on next."

Fortune's lecture was preceded by a glowing introduction from Tim Hunt, chair of the department of English. Hunt explained that Fortune was more than deserving of the distinguished lecturer honor.

"In my 30-plus years at this institution he is the most thoughtful and generous mentor of junior colleagues I have ever known," Hunt said. "In all that time, he has only disappointed me once. And that was a few days ago when he said he would retire."

Following his lecture, Fortune was presented with a medallion given to all distinguished lecturers in the series.

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