Reading Reality Hunger has made me see that any piece of writing is a craft of art, and then the writer rearranges the different parts of the artwork to get a complete picture, as D. Shields said: "What actually happened is only raw material; what the writer makes of what happened is all that matters."

When I first started reading the book: Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, I was so confused since I could not seem to see any structure in the narrative. I just could not see the whole picture or story that Reality Hunger is trying to show. After our class discussion on Tuesday, I realized that David Shields's book is a collection of quotes which now makes much more sense.

... so what's "real" is emotion and reaction rather than a factual, researched piece of literature (assuming that a map is a form of nonfiction), and reality is defined by the individual and their experiences. I'm not sure if I find that notion refreshing or unsettling.

 Course record: 9/7/10

  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.

Brain, Education, and Inquiry

Bryn Mawr College, Fall 2010

Session 2

Class is itself an experiment in a particular form of education: co-constructive inquiry

Learning by interacting, sharing observations and understandings to create, individually and collectively, new understandings and new questions that motivate new observations

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.