FREE REALITY HUNGER: A MANIFESTO PDF Professor David Shields | 221 pages | 08 Feb 2011 | Random House USA Inc | 9780307387974 | English | New York, United States Reality Hunger: A Manifesto - David ShieldsDavid Shields This website uses cookies to help us give you the best experience when you Reality Hunger: A Manifesto our website. By continuing to use this website, you consent to our use of these cookies. One of the most sustained pieces of writing that David Shields presents us with in this polemic-as-mosaic comes very near the book's close, just ahead of nine tightly set pages of footnotes. Shields urges us not to read further and, indeed, the inner margins that follow feature a dotted line, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto we wish to scissor the pages out and "restore this book to the form in which I intended it to be read" that is, without the Reality Hunger: A Manifesto insistence of copyright lawyers. In short, we will get the most out of Reality Hunger if we embrace uncertainty and choose not to know whose sentences we have been reading over the previous couple of hundred pages. What to make of a writer Reality Hunger: A Manifesto because Shields's own words frequently appear among the quotations from literary critics and academics, film-makers, musicians and writers ranging from Nietzsche and Proust to Jonathan Raban and Geoff Dyer - so intent on disrupting the reading experience? One can't Reality Hunger: A Manifesto that, at a certain level, it works: the fiddly structures why, for example, is the book divided into sort-of- chapters given both titles such as "mimesis", "risk" and "doubt", and letters of the alphabet? But try to match writer with written, and one immediately becomes a fussy librarian, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto dotting the "i"s on an index card, enslaved by literalism and blind to the liberating power of authorial ambiguity. Yet there is something illuminating - beyond the immediate gratification of the swot - in contextualising the book's material; it allows you not only to bring your own knowledge to the party surely not a bad thingbut also to chart Shields's train of thought; to watch it curve its way around those he admires and steamroll over those he doesn't. He is "at once desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice", and his loyalties lie with those who blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, who reject the notion of objective reality in life as much as in art, and who are keen to appropriate Reality Hunger: A Manifesto technologies to reinforce their ideas of artistic playfulness and freedom. So the near-impossible-to-classify writer W G Sebald, the photographer Sophie Calle and the memoirist Lauren Slater all get a big thumbs-up. In art, "purposeless" is an entirely movable judgement that depends on what your original purpose might be; and it is in the nature of a manifesto to delineate and justify those criteria. In that regard, Shields succeeds admirably; we are left in little doubt as to his tastes and beliefs. He sees in the novel's omniscient narrator a doomed attempt to mimic a godlike authority; and Reality Hunger: A Manifesto solution, by way of the "lyric essay", is to suggest a fragmentary and partial approach that follows the contours of personal experience and subjectivity. We understand also that current innovations that threaten the hegemony of copyright and destabilise the vertical relationships between artist and audience play usefully into a new narrative of democracy and imaginative freedom. Where it is harder to toe the line, however, is with Shields's covert suggestion that he is breaking thrilling ground or, for that matter, documenting a movement that really is bursting into life Reality Hunger: A Manifesto than evolving gradually and haphazardly. When he writes that a "story seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, No, it doesn't", what I want to say is that you might search a long time to find anyone who thinks it does. Reality Hunger comes garlanded with ecstatic review blurbs all of them, interestingly enough, carefully attributedone of which likens the book to a "miracle". Others fall from the mouths of those quoted in its pages. That in itself tells a pretty compelling tale of how much we have invested in locating the form-breaking, even when we find it in what is an interesting, if mildly overblown, book that doesn't choose to interrogate itself closely enough. This article first appeared in the 08 March issue of the New Statesman, Game on. Sign up. You are browsing in private mode. Reality Hunger - Wikipedia Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Reality Hunger by David Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. An open call for new literary and other art forms to match the complexities of the twenty-first century. Reality TV dominates broadband. YouTube and Facebook dominate the web. Most artistic movements are attempts to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art. The questions Reality Hunger explores—the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real—play out constantly all around us. Drawing on myriad sources, Shields takes an audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future. People will either love or hate this book. Its converts will see it as a rallying cry; its detractors will view it as an occasion for defending the Reality Hunger: A Manifesto quo. It is certain to be one of the most controversial and talked-about books of the year. Get A Copy. Hardcoverpages. Published February 23rd by Knopf first published More Details Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Reality Hungerplease sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Every act of composition is an act of fiction. I kept bumping into it at my favorite used bookshop, thumbing through it and reading little bits here and there, finding myself confused by the format -- was it a book of quotes or a book of random thoughts? The next time I came back, it would be gone of course! Eventually, of course, another copy would show up on the shelves and I would start the whole process over again. Eventually that Chip Kidd cover won me over Reality Hunger: A Manifesto I took it home. This is basically the postmodern literary equivalent of building a song out of samples. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto was about halfway through before I realized that a huge chunk of this book is sourced from elsewhere, remixed, modified, recombined, and used interstitially between genuine writing done by Shields himself Reality Hunger: A Manifesto tie this whole crazy opus together. Which honestly, is the exact kind of reaction you want something to evoke in others. Anyway, I think those people with intense opinions on it are thinking way too literally, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto might benefit from the practice of trying to hold two opposing opinions in their heads at the same time, and mulling them over. Let journalism handle facts, and let both our non-fiction and fiction pieces of art just be. Or maybe none of that too. Or maybe -- and this is more realistic here -- just some of it. Pick and choose, etc. I had to take a lot of breaks -- short and long -- to give myself time to process the concepts. I took a lot of notes to organize my thoughts; trying to Reality Hunger: A Manifesto to the bottom of what I was Reality Hunger: A Manifesto about what was being said. If I came across something that really got my thinking, I threw the book down and went for a walk to mull it over a little. Or maybe I would just put it down for a few days, read something else, and come back to it when I was really interested again in the questions it was posing; when the ideas were pulling me back in. Paraphrasing, of course, but some of those questions were: What sort of responsibility should a memoirist have to literal facts? Can we actually trust our memory enough to Reality Hunger: A Manifesto anything we remember as fact? How much truth is there in fiction? How much fiction do we allow in non-fiction? If the point of memoir is that more important bit, does it actually have to be married to truth at all? Who owns ideas? Do we necessarily always need Form and Story and Narrative and the other usual pieces of storytelling? Is the space between truth and fiction actually more interesting anyway? View 2 comments. Feb 25, Buck rated it liked it. After a slow start, the ensuing discussion turned into a bloody street fight: names were called, knives were pulled and, tragically, feelings were hurt. Pretty much everyone involved lost their shit, including me. Good times, good times. It feels like driving a car in a clown suit. I find myself thinking, "Come on, man, you're just making that shit up. The interesting stuff is all happening on the fringes of the form where there are Reality Hunger: A Manifesto of jazz and elements of all sorts of other things as well.