New York Times bestselling author holds lecture

The literary world needs to forget preconceived notions of fiction and nonfiction and develop new forms of literature that mimic the digital, fast-paced developments of the 21st century, New York Times bestselling author David Shields said to an audience of about 60 people on Monday night.

In a lecture titled "Genre is a Minimum Security Prison," Shields spoke on his 10th book, "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto," which argues for a more sophisticated notion of nonfiction writing that would keep up with contemporary society.

The rapt audience in the Brown-Alley Room listened as Shields argued that the typical old and crumbling forms of literature were not meeting the need for reality in today's society.

Shields said his book argued for a more sophisticated notion of nonfiction as an art, where writers could borrow from previous writers. "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto" began as a course book for a class he taught as an English professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Shields created a binder of quotations for the course filled with quotations he had collected from favorite authors and written.

Throughout the years, Shields began to notice that he could create categories of quotations such as memory, risk and doubt. The arguments of "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto" stem from Shields taking various quotations and remixing them.

"The book is a call to arms to fellow writers to obliterate the distance between fiction and nonfiction and to develop new forms of literature for the new century where we live in an artificial, immediate world," Shields said.

Shields said his book also dealt with the issue of appropriation as it is used today, saying that writers such as William Shakespeare and James Joyce had always used other writers' work. Today, issues of plagiarism and appropriation in literature and art are in the news on a weekly basis, he said. After lengthy arguments with lawyers and his publisher, Shields said he had been forced to include citations of the quotations that were the basis for his book.

"But please don't read them," he said. "I preface the appendix with a disclaimer that says not to read the citations if you're going to read the book how I want you to."

The books that Shields champions are books that have as thin a membrane as possible between writer and reader, he said.

"It should be done like a literary collage, which instead of putting the narrative machine at the center, the work is collage-like, allowing the writer to go where he or she wants to go to get deeper into the topic," he said. "The effect of that is that the reader is reading to find out how all the material comes together."

During his introduction for Shields, Bertram Ashe, a professor of English, said, "Many books are called important, but Shields' book actually is important."

Contact staff writer Elise Reinemann at: elise.reinemann@richmond.edu