Reality Hunger’s antifiction manifesto centers on the blurring of fiction and nonfiction

Evidence

In a book heralded as clarion by every venue from academic journals to The Colbert Report, David Shields denounced postmodern irony and urged “serious writing” to cast off the bondage of fiction, exactly at the same moment Knausgaard and many others were concluding that conventional fictional plots and characterization were no longer capable of “embodying what it’s like to be alive.” The starving artists of Shields’s Reality Hunger promote instead antifiction and anti-genre: “a deliberate unartiness, raw material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored … literal tone … autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring to the point of invisibility of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real.” (Get this “blur”: it will become our master image of immediacy style in “Writing,” “Video,” and “Imaginary.”) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 124

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘The blur’ is flagged as the master image of immediacy style—a definitional anchor for identifying the aesthetic feature across mediums.