ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to examine the poetics and politics of collage in David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010) and How Literature Saved My Life (2013). Although collage has been the default formal principle of Shields’s writing since the early 1990s, the chapter chooses to focus on those two texts, because – alongside their structural indebtedness to collage – they directly engage with it on the level of ideas, by critiquing the conventional novel and presenting collage literature as the desired alternative. Following a presentation of the collage structure of both works, the chapter outlines the numerous charges that Shields, particularly in Reality Hunger, levels against the traditional novel. That critique serves as the basis for an ensuing discussion of Shields’s postulates of fragmentariness, free appropriation and the obliteration of the fiction/non-fiction divide, all of which can be combined in collage literature.
