Non-Fictional Prose Course

  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?

 Reality Hunger is definitely a thought-provoking book about the nature of “reality.” I think that it accomplishes what it set out to do in creating an authentic snapshot of information in the modern world. However, since it is not the conventional way of organizing thought in literature, I found the book a bit hard to digest. I think that humans by nature like patters, and it was basically impossible to find any sort of pattern or coherence in Reality Hunger, simply because of what it set out to do. Also, I can understand why Shields takes offense to what he calls the “contrived feel” of popular novels, but I don’t think that most people read novels for the “reality” of them.

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.

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. 

 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.

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.  

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.

 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.