David Shields: "The Novel Is Dead; Long Live the Anti-Novel" |
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David Shields, best-selling author and UW English Professor, argues for "evolution beyond the narrative." In Shields' summary of htis talk:
"Art, not to mention life, now seems to happen primarily in liminal spaces, edited, quoted and quoted again and recontextualized, replaced, collaged, stitched together anew. The stitching together anew is what I really care about. The novel is dead; long live the anti-novel and the un-novel, built from scraps. I’m not interested in collage as the refuge of the compositionally disabled. I’m interested in collage as an evolution beyond narrative. A great painting comes together, just barely. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Collage is the primary art form of the twenty-first century." This Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities took place Fall 2018. More information on this talk is available at: ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures/novel-dead-long-live-anti-novel *Learn more about the series and The Simpson Center:* ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/ *Stay updated on related events on social media:* ✔ https://twitter.com/simpson_center ✔ https://www.instagram.com/simpson_center ✔ https://www.facebook.com/simpson.center *Speaker bio* David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-three books, including Reality Hunger (recently named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade by LitHub), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention was published in 2018; The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power appeared in 2019. James Franco’s film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017 (available now on Amazon Prime, iTunes/Apple TV, Vudu, Vimeo, Kanopy, and Google Play). Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance (rave reviews in the New Yorker, Nation, and dozens of other publications; film festival awards all over the world; available now on Sundance TV/AMC, Amazon Prime, iTunes/Apple TV, Google Play, etc.). A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages. More about David Shields at: https://davidshields.com/biography |