Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Non-Fictional Prose

Submitted by Anne Dalke on Sat, 05/22/2010 - 7:26am

Ideas after class on 9/7

Submitted by EVD on Tue, 09/07/2010 - 7:43pm

My thoughts about Reality Hunger changed after our discussion today..When I first started reading I thought it would be a lot easier to read the book if it had chapter titles or subtitles that made sense or let you know what you were about to read beforehand or if the segments were in a more obvious order. Someone in class today said something like if you "play the game" that Shields is trying to get us to go along with (reading his work how he wants it to be read- as a collage-type thing) then it really is easier for me to read the book without subtitles or anything like that.

There are new ideas

Submitted by AyaSeaver on Tue, 09/07/2010 - 1:09pm

Hi everyone! My name is Aya and I'm a sophomore trying to put together some kind of creative writing/english independent major. I work a lot with memoir.

Authenticity

Submitted by platano on Tue, 09/07/2010 - 9:46am

Normal.dotm 0 0 1 235 1340 Commonwealth School 11 2 1645

I'm channeling my childhood with this post

Submitted by mkarol on Tue, 09/07/2010 - 9:14am

As I was reading Reality Hunger and came upon the part explaining that most of our memories are stored verbally rather than as actual pictures, I thought back to what I think was an old Spongebob episode (but I could have the wrong cartoon, because my memory is, after all, only able to recollect bits and pieces). In the show, Spongebob forgets how to do something, and there's a scene that shows a mini Spongebob inside his own brain going through dozens of file cabinets, trying to locate whatever "file"/memory it was that was lost. I think that's the way most of us grew up imagining our memories and banks of knowledge, but Reality Hunger contests the idea.

Oprah, Frey, self absorption, Oprah, Frey, self absorption- oh yeah, and faction/fiction

Submitted by rachelr on Mon, 09/06/2010 - 9:55pm

While my title for this post may sound highly critical of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, I did enjoy many of the ideas that David Shields presented. Some of his seemingly "random" bits of information, while I struggled to find a direct correlation to the overriding theme of a book (if there even is one of those- Shields seems to eschew the idea of "traditional" writing so much that it is challenging for me to follow even his set up for the book), really interested me. I found his fact that "In the second century b.c., Terrence said, "There's nothing to say that hasn't been said before" (7) both depressing and though provoking.

Collaborative Memory

Submitted by jaranda on Mon, 09/06/2010 - 5:58pm

Non-Fictional Prose Course

My name is Julia, and I am a senior East Asian Studies major. This is my first English class since CSEM, which makes me feel kind of old, since I don't think it's even called CSEM anymore.

I don't hate "Reality Hunger"...

Submitted by kgould on Mon, 09/06/2010 - 4:04pm

Non-Fictional Prose Course

Hello all!

I'm Kate Gould, a senior English major with a Biology minor. I've taken several modern/contemporary English classes but they have all concerned fictional prose and, as someone who loves science, I've been hankering for an English course on non-fiction.

I worked this summer with Paul Grobstein in the Biology department in BSIE, which you can find links to under the "Come Talk About" column (if you're really that interested, that is. It's cool if you're not. Hah!), and a lot of that work took place here on Serendip. I've been posting things here since my freshman year so if anyone has any problems or issues (outside of administrative issues, of course) I'd be happy to help.

Interesting Reading

Submitted by Smacholdt on Fri, 09/03/2010 - 10:50am

My name is Sarah, I'm a freshmen, and I have never taken a class strictly on non-fiction, but I am very excited to take this course. I thought the reading, "Memory and Imagination" made an interesting point that forgetting details and lying, while similar, are not necessarily the same thing. I am also excited to read the book Reality Hunger.

Add new comment

Thoughts About "Texts Without Context"

Submitted by EVD on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 5:13pm

I really enjoyed reading "Texts Without Context" by Michiko Kakutani, especially the first section concerning plagiarism. Jaron Lanier makes a case for plagiarism by describing the "mashup" of thinking in the modern world as positive because new culminations of previous thinking lead to ideas "more important than the sources who were mashed." ...These ideas, while not obviously related to our fact vs fiction discussion, made me see the fact vs fiction problem in a new way. Maybe the "mashup" of ideas that Lanier describes is similar to a memoir writer's "mashup" of experiences.

Whose story

Submitted by mkarol on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 10:19am

While reading the excerpt from Patricia Hampl's book, what stuck out the most to me was: "For the memoirist, more than for the fiction writer, the story seems already accomplished and fully achieved in history ("in reality", as we naively say)".

Excitement

Submitted by tgarber on Tue, 08/31/2010 - 7:53pm

My name is Tyler and I am extremely excited to take this course. I read the article "Memory and Imagination" and enjoyed the quote, "True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world"(Hampl).

1 comment

Towards Day 4: Reality Check

Submitted by Anne Dalke on Sat, 08/07/2010 - 7:20pm

Towards Day 3: "Reality Hunger"

Submitted by Anne Dalke on Thu, 08/05/2010 - 7:38pm

Towards Day 2: "Memory and Imagination"

Submitted by Anne Dalke on Thu, 08/05/2010 - 11:32am

Towards Day 1: Identifying the Genre (?)

Submitted by Anne Dalke on Tue, 08/03/2010 - 7:19pm