ABSTRACT
In 2010, David Shields released his aesthetic manifesto Reality Hunger to sustained media attention. Consisting of 618 numbered sections arranged by alphabetical themes, the book combines hundreds of unacknowledged quotations with Shields’s own musings on the nature of art in the twenty-first century, collapsing the division between primary and secondary texts, and arguably redefining the role of the author as a single, stable locus of meaning and intent. In the ‘overture’, Shields reflects on Dave Eggers’s popular memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), finding that it ‘was full of the same self-conscious apparatus that had bored everyone silly until it got tethered to what felt like someone’s “real life”’; even a book that explicitly reminds its readers of its artifice, Shields finds, can still provide a moment of ‘authenticity’ (Shields 2010: 5). Works such as Eggers’s, he argues, serve as examples of a new artistic movement founded on elements such as ‘deliberate unartiness’, ‘reader/viewer participation’, ‘criticism as autobiography’, ‘self-reflexivity’, and finally ‘a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real’ (5). As James Wood comments in a review of Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2012) Shields’s title is particularly apposite: ‘[r]ealism is perpetually hungry […] because no bound manuscript can ever be “real” enough’ (Wood 2012). In a variety of forms, ranging from romans à clef and fictionalised autobiographies to fiction presented in the form of autobiographies, diaries, and memoirs, as well as texts that problematise all categorical distinctions, contemporary writers constantly renegotiate the value of the ‘real’.
