Reply to comment

  Shields' 'work' is clearly designed to make its point not only through what it says, but how it says it. However, I do question if whether Shields went overboard in his experiment, going so far as to make his book unpalatable. His conceit lies in his rejection of traditional form with the 'cut and paste' method he used to assembling his work. He even goes so far as to suggest that we, his readers, remove those citations at the end of the novel that his lawyers insisted he include. But isn't this overkill? I would have preferred him to preserve his form and not hit us over the head with what he was trying to say. If his argument is valid, won't his form speak for itself? Wouldn't the form alone prove to us that citation is outmoded without having to explicitly and redundantly say as much? Or would his argument not have been clear enough?