The CounterText interview : David Shields. Ten years of reality hunger

Abstract

Ten years since its publication, David Shields’ Reality Hunger (Knopf, 2010) remains a work that resists easy classification. It can be viewed, broadly, as literary and cultural commentary, but it is also distinctly performative and manifesto-like (its subtitle, indeed, declares it ‘A Manifesto’). It was, or rather is, both of its time and anticipatory – zeitgeisty as well as unnervingly prophetic. As Alex Pappademas put it in GQ: ‘It's a book that feels at least five years ahead of its time’, a judgement that today, if anything, may seem a little conservative. Unusually for a work of ‘cultural criticism’, even one as arrestingly bold and trenchant as it undoubtedly is, Reality Hunger had immediate mainstream impact and, ten years on, it continues to be an important point of reference for anyone trying to understand contemporary (post-)literary cultures. In this interview we revisit Reality Hunger and ask David Shields about its enduring appeal and whether the intervening years – tumultuous years, by any measure – have inclined him to modify his position at all.