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

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'm starting to do work on my thesis, which at the moment is TBA and a work-in-progress, but I am interested in working with both fiction and non-fiction and finding a way to merge my major and my minor into a coherent exploration of... some topic. Maybe medicine. Maybe zombies and T.S. Eliot. Who knows?

So as I started reading "Reality Hunger," I have to admit that I wasn't expecting much. After mucking my way through the really negative review by Kakutani, I wasn't really looking forward to what she described as "deliberately provocative and deeply nihilistic."

But, after getting through Shields's book, I can't say that Kakutani really got the point of what he was trying to say. I mean, honestly, her article is little more than a "mash-up," or rehash of what others, experts, have said about the nature of the internet, burgeoning communication efforts, and plagiarism. How is what she's done so different from Shield's recombination of quotes and ideas from other people?

He isn't saying that there isn't anything left to say, or that we can only express ourselves through what others have already said or thought-- I think he takes an uncanny approach in saying something very new by using things that have been said before. Who owns reality? Who owns the words? So you put them together in such a way as to form a coherent sentence (a rare feat, I concede, since I so rarely stumble upon coherence in my own mumblings), but does that mean you own that sentence? No one else can say it without paying royalties? That's silly. It's nonsense. Language is rehashed and reused and recombined and quoted and copied over and over...

Shields writes in fragment number "10": "In the second century b.c., Terence said, "There's nothing to say that hasn't said before" (7). This is both true and false. I feel like this is where Kakutani got hung up, which is, sadly, at the beginning of the book. Shields doesn't mean to imply that everything has been said. That's silly. Terence said it in the SECOND CENTURY. He's saying that the very nature of language means that we're going to use the same words and phrases over and over again. It's their context, their intent, and their intended meaning that changes and will continue to change...

tl;dr, if you're using English to write, then you're not doing anything new!