Anybodies: The Fact, The Fiction and The Make-Believe of Referencing

Abstract

David Shields' Reality Hunger (2010) is a collage of ideas; sources are not included to illustrate the notion that ideas are not owned. His approach, dynamic and performative, also creates a denial of the body (as symbol, as imagined author). This essay explores the relationship between text and body by considering how we, as readers and writers, might consider an author's or other artist's body to be. Whether we imagine it to be the literal form, which we might not know and have no experience of, or something more metaphorical. Work by authors that explores the notion of body is examined and used to consider how we can understand the body of an author as something solid but subject to constant change and interpretation. The body, then, becomes a place of fiction and non-fiction; referencing too becomes both an act of fictionalising and making real another author's body.