Summary

Chapter a [sic] is titled “overture.” In 1, the author starts by saying “every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art” (3). He also suggests that that creators in a range of genres from essay to film and television to performance art to graffiti “are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work” (3). He adds the comment that according to the writer Vladimir Nabokov, reality “is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks” (4).

Then, in numbers 2 through 6, the text considers how different sorts of reality are being layered into different sorts of texts, and blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction. The primary argument here is that no matter how real a work of writing is...