...David Shields argued for such a blurring on Start the Week. Shields believes that novels are irrelevant and that non-fiction has taken over. Living in an artificial and mediated world, he thinks we’ve become obsessed with reality. But do the real stories we tell have to be our own and do they have to be true?
Shield asks where does plagiarism end and creativity begin? Does it matter if some of our facts are other people’s fictions? Storytellers have been reusing ideas and phrases for centuries; is it time to acknowledge that ‘borrowing nobly’ is the way forward?
Asking is the novel dead? is art theft? can you copyright reality?, a subsequent LSE event challenged Shields about his questioning of our basic assumptions about art, the novel, journalism, poetry, film, TV, rap, stand-up, graffiti, sampling, plagiarism, writing, and reading. This discussion about Shields' manifesto also explored wider complexities of art and literature in the 21st century and featured Geoff Dyer and Robert Hudson.
