Reality Hunger Research Essay
What is [what shapes] your reality?
BACKGROUND:
Writing an essay should be a personal, not an academic, process. I’ll put it another way: academic pursuits that recruit the three skills (reading, thinking, writing) we cultivate in this class are already necessarily personal, but most essays we write in composition classes either ignore or suppress this fact; we subordinate the self and adopt a conventional academic tone. The subordination of the personal voice is a problem. Style gives way to convention. Form becomes format, a formality. And when style and form can’t transcend generic formal conventions, the thoughts on the page are detached from the realities of personhood (or they’re relegated to the portion of our identities labeled “student” or “academic”). Don’t misunderstand me; learning to write an academic argumentative essay in MLA format is an important skill, but it’s not a skill I feel I need to assess over and over again. You’ve already done it in this class and in the prerequisite to this class. My concern now is for your future as a writer and a thinker. Maybe that’s grandiose, but that’s the reality.
AI Warning:
Do not use AI for this essay. Any AI that helps you select or “correct” your diction, syntax, punctuation, or grammar will be flagged by the AI-checking software and will result in a ZERO grade. You will probably not have time to rewrite this essay after I grade it, so don’t use ANY programs that might result in AI flags (Grammarly, Quillbot, ChatGPT, etc.). If you think it might be AI, it probably is.
ASSIGNMENT:
Write an essay, ~2,000 words about how you experience reality. The essay should indicate, directly or indirectly, some influence from Reality Hunger.
Need more direction? OK: write 2,000 words about or related to the concepts and ideas in Reality Hunger.
Incorporate 3-10 sections, preferably from several different lettered chapters, from Shields’ book into your essay.
Incorporate 3-5 other sources that help you develop your line(s) of thinking. The only real rule is you should write about something you care about (and by “care” I don’t mean write about the most important “issue” or whatever; it could be make-up tutorials, sneaker collabs, stand-up comedy, online gamer culture, the Senate confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson, etc.).
I encourage you to collage, to experiment with structure and form, to use a mix of narrative and critical modes, to incorporate images, screenshots, sounds, handwritten lists.
SOME SEGMENTS OF RH THAT GOT ME THINKING ABOUT THIS ASSIGNMENT:
409 Why bother conducting an experiment at all if you know what results it will yield? Maybe every essay automatically is in some way experimental–not an outline traveling toward a foregone conclusion but an unmapped quest that has sprung from the word question. […]
355 […] It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
547 […] Experience [in/of contemporary culture] is always secondhand, planned and described for one’s consumption for others in advance. Even the rare, authentically direct experience is spoiled by self-consciousness. We’re doomed to an imitation of life.*
*I’m not sure I agree with the last sentence of segment 547. If I disagree, I’m not sure whether I disagree in total (i.e. I don’t believe we’re doomed to an imitation of life), or whether I take issue with the diction (doomed: such a fateful word, so absolute, and, as such, it undercuts itself; if there’s no way to avoid it, then it’s just life, right? imitation: it’s true that most experience is influenced or mediated in some way; think of our zero-level discussions, or think of how the algorithms determine what we see online, but awareness of influence just adds another layer to experience), or maybe I disagree with the premise, the assumption that there is such a thing as a binary of real/imitation life.
FINDING A FORM
FINDING A FORM/STRUCTURE
