ABSTRACT
In his book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, David Shields attempts to rationalize and articulate the dying of the novel as the traditional and quintessentially modernist mirror of life, of lives led, and of the contemporary condition of modern society per se. Without actually explaining what is wrong with "nostalgic entertainment," Shields goes on to argue for a literary form to displace the narrative one; a form that eschews plot and narrative and reflects the "real" which is an "unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored and unprofessional" writing. The general conception of the constitution of what has been portentously termed "the western canon" is today very far from what Victorian high cultural guru Matthew Arnold, in his Culture and Anarchy, famously saw as embodying "the best that has been said and thought in the world." The canon was, for the Left, a sizable and ever-expanding list that could include anyone from Shakespeare to Gibbon, and from Plato to Joyce.
