Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2004
Abstract
Based on an address she gave at Hanover College in 1996, the collection opens with an essay by Carol Shields, "Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard," in which she argues that readers have a hunger for narrative that can never be satisfied. This hunger, which manifests itself in a cultural fascination with obituaries and biographies, is related to the insufficiency of language to describe the world. Were language to match experience exactly, the reader could rest. But because experience can never be articulated in its totality, readers long for more. Shields argues that one of the reasons this hunger persists unabated is that certain stories, particularly those by women, continue to be considered irrelevant or unpublishable. Hunger for narrative, motivating both reader and writer, is then both good and bad, driven by loss but also driving the production of beauty, art, and (temporary) satiation.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 24:3 (Summer 2004). Copyright © 2004 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.