Definition:
Voice or mask that an author or speaker or performer puts on for a particular purpose. Plural: personae or personas. See:
Etymology:
From the Latin, "mask"Examples and Observations:
- "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
(Oscar Wilde) - "According to those who knew him well, Hemingway was a sensitive, often shy man whose enthusiasm for life was balanced by his ability to listen intently . . .. That was not the Hemingway of the news stories. The media wanted and encouraged a brawnier Hemingway, a two-fisted man whose life was fraught with dangers. The author, a newspaper man by training, was complicit in this creation of a public persona, a Hemingway that was not without factual basis, but also not the whole man. Critics, especially, but the public as well, Hemingway hinted in his 1933 letter to Perkins, were eager 'automatically' to 'label' Hemingway's characters as himself, which helped establish the Hemingway persona, a media-created Hemingway that would shadow--and overshadow--the man and writer."
(Michael Reynolds, "Hemingway in Our Times" The New York Times, July 11, 1999) - "It is to my other self, to Borges, that things happen. I walk about Buenos Aires and I pause, almost mechanically, to contemplate the arch of an entry or the portal of a church; news of Borges comes to me in the mail, and I see his name on a short list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I am fond of hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, the etymology of words, the tang of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson; the other one shares these enthusiasms, but in a rather vain, theatrical way. . . .
"I cannot tell which one of us is writing this page."
(Jorge Luis Borges, "Borges and I")
Pronunciation: per-SON-nah
