Content Tagged ‘David Shields’

A reader’s log

January 1, 2014 | 19 Comments

New essay era, 17 classics by women

February 21, 2013 | 6 Comments

  Bonus: Jake Adam York offers a fine minute of writing advice. We’re living in the golden age of essays, proclaims a February 18 essay by Adam Kirsch in  New Republic. In “The New Essayists, or the Decline of a Form? The Essay as Reality Television,” Kirsch immediately invokes as an example John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, which in another day, with its roots in magazine pieces and celebrity profiles, might have been labeled journalism—but which, as an exciting hybrid of …

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What’s an essay, what’s journalism?

February 10, 2012 | 4 Comments

“From journalism to the essay to the memoir: the trip being taken by a nonfiction persona deepens, and turns ever more inward.” —Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story Over thirty years ago, in the heyday of the New Journalism, Tom Wolfe enumerated the techniques, associated with fiction, that can make journalism equally absorbing. He repeated his precepts recently in an essay, “The Emotional Core of the Story,” collected in the excellent 2007 textbook Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writer’s …

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Poetry & journalism

March 23, 2011 | 3 Comments

Archibald MacLeish’s great essay on literature vs. transcription. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.—John Updike As with David Shields, when Archibald MacLeish talks about “poetry” he means poetry in the larger sense of writing that is literary art vs. writing considered a mere transcription of events. Good journalism was never that, but exemplary works of reportage have always tended to get lumped by the literati—perhaps more so in MacLeish’s day—with garden-variety news …

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B. Dylan meets A. MacLeish

March 16, 2011 | 7 Comments

How Archibald MacLeish courted Bob Dylan for a musical. Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) won three Pulitzer prizes, two for poetry and one for his play about Job, J.B, which also won a Tony Award. His collected poems won the National Book Award. Like some other famous writers of his generation, MacLeish served as an ambulance driver in World War I but also as an artillery officer. After the war he moved to Paris and knew many artists, including Gertrude Stein, John …

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Annie Dillard’s ‘Living By Fiction’ — a review and appreciation

July 9, 2010 | 11 Comments

Annie Dillard first published Living By Fiction in 1982. She might have called it Living by Literature because although it’s about her love affair with reading fiction in particular, she says more about nonfiction in a few asides and by implication than some books entirely on the topic.

Her categories of “traditional” and “contemporary modernist” approaches, of “fine” prose and “plain” prose styles, cross genres as well. In fact, Living by Fiction enabled me better to appreciate and to understand David Shields’s less coherent and useful Reality Hunger for what it is: a modernist’s aesthetic.

Dillard prefers “contemporary modernist” work herself (in her lexicon, that’s postmodernism), but she’s knowing in her explanation of the forces—human, societal, economic—that drive writers into the middle ground. She observes that most writers are working there, including excellent ones, somewhere on the bell curve between traditional and modernist approaches, between fine prose and plain. Most people “write largely traditional fiction.”

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Real art for our virtual times

June 26, 2010 | No Comments

David Shields’s audacious Reality Hunger has provoked much discussion and many mixed notices. Thomas Larson, journalist, essayist, and critic, has just weighed in in Agni Online, wittily calling the book “an improvised explosive device applied to the sacred cow of narrative,” his essay as much about today’s cultural sea change as it is an appreciative review. Larson is author of The Memoir and the Memoirist, reviewed on this blog, and of the forthcoming book The Saddest Music Ever Written: The …

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