Tag: David Shields
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The Aesthetics of a Congealing Artform
In the latest New Yorker, James Wood challenges David Shields on some of his assumptions about the tension between authorial intentions and the representation of reality in fiction: Does literature progress, like medicine or engineering? … Perhaps it is as absurd to talk about progress in literature as it is to talk about progress in electricity […]
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Fiction Starvation
In his literary manifesto, Reality Hunger, David Shields writes of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections: I couldn’t read that book if my life depended on it. It might be a “good” novel or it might be a “bad” novel, but something has happened to my imagination, which can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of novelistic […]