Non-Fictional Prose

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 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.

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.

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.

 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).