Reality and Genre

Reality Hunger uses aphorisms to add to the collage that Shields has created. There are allusions, direct facts, and aphorisms mixed up in each chapter but they all have to do wit a single idea. The aphorisms I chose had to do with ideas of reality. How we accept certain things to be true or influence the actual facts to match up with the reality we wish was there.

"Genre is a minimum security prison" chapter G

Genre is not the final say. A person might classify a book as a mystery while another might consider it a thriller. I agree with the quote because By relating genre to a minimum security prison, it is understood why it might be of little importance at times. The genre of anything can jump from one to another depending on the perspective of the person. Each perspective is different but accepting when it becomes aare of something decided before hand. For example, if told by my teacher that the book we are reading is a mystery, I accept it is a mystery. If I did not have this knowledge before hand, I would classify the novel based on my own perspective. Sometimes our own perspective and the given language might combine and this is how we notice how genre has minimum security. There might be rules or ideas how to classify something but in the end, they are not mandatory to follow. 




"Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any" chapter H

I think it is not exactly that what we experience isn't real, but rather that it is not the real events we want. The media and TV shows make the most random events seem like something that we should be experiencing on a daily basis. The obsession describes in this aphorism could explain our fascination with reality TV  The realities presented in Jersey Shore or The Kardashian's, seem to be way more interesting than our own realities and so people attempt to mimic these realities and these are the fake realities. I blame this for making people feel disappointed with their lives and not really experiencing reality.

"In our hunger for all things true, we make the facts irrelevant" chapter I

It does seem this way. When we want something to be true we disregard even the most obvious facts. In a sense this aphorism could describe ignorance. We rather believe what we want than actually acknowledge the facts that prove that it isn't this way. For example, a bad relationship. Maybe the guy is very subtle in the way he hurts the girl and it takes her some time to realize the truth behind what the guy said. She realizes he is hurting her and that she is not happy in the relationship but instead of acknowledging the facts, she turns them into something with no importance. In the girls hunger for something true, in this case love and acceptance, she makes the facts that point out how bad the relationship really is, irrelevant.