Fictocritical Innovations. Pawel Cholewa

and Nettelbeck 109), “a textual no-man’s land” (Dawson 139), “a writing of compounds and mutations, a hybrid writing which is not just any one thing, but not any one thing” (White et al. 10-11), an “inchoate category” (Schlunke and Brewster 393) that allows or permits one to really disperse oneself and the ‘I’.

      This book involves two very distinct and different perspectives, each of which has a unique ‘voice’ and persona: the four-part creative component is recounted by a self-conscious creative informal self in four folios; while the four theoretical theses, which dissect the creative folios and explore the fictocritical strategies, are written with the more clinical and formal voice of a literary scientist, referred to as the analytical self. It was necessary to develop a sense of estrangement between these two personas, to split the author and researcher, (myself, Pawel Cholewa), into these two diverged voices. This is done to be consistent with, and to further the notion of fictocriticism being “double-voiced” (Kerr 93).

      Double-voicedness is a key feature within the context of fictocriticism, and it requires some expounding. Double-voicedness is about subtext: the voice on top and the voice on the bottom, or the voices of the writer speaking side-by-side. They are the yin and yang of duality within the context of writing. One is generally creative, the other critical. One is about poeticism and storytelling, the other is about critique, social commentary, philosophy or concrete theory. They can be integrated, work in tandem, or contrast and reverberate off one another dichotomously. They are the tangible and the intangible, working with, against or through one another.

      My separation between creative self and analytical self, in the folios and theses of this work, makes this literary technique and function very obvious and literal. This deliberate estrangement of personas, the development of a schism between creative self and analytical self, also enables the subtleties of double-voicedness to be better seen and more clearly recognised in the creative folios.

      For obvious reasons, it is generally quite difficult to write about oneself. If my ‘self’ is going to be interesting, it has to be vulnerable to change. The analytical self in the theses, recorded in the third-person, is armour-plated in dealing with new emerging problems and innovations of fictocriticism. The creative self (or selves), most often in the state of confessing in the first-person, can be guarded at times, but change dramatically over the course of the work. The creative self is not safeguarded to the point that it is immobile. The point of this is to remove the armour carried around with us. The narrative arc, as well as the multitudinous perspectives in the writings, show this. Both diverged selves, just as my own complete persona, change through the process of this exploration. I am not the same researcher or creative writer as I was at the outset of my PhD in 2013, nor do I necessarily hold to the same views and opinions I held between the ages of 25 and 30 (2013–2017); these views and opinions are more so in the creative act of venting/catharsis.

      To assist in comprehending the complexity and nature of these ‘selves’ and their (correlating) diverged sections, a brief list of the terminology used in this book, is provided prior to this introduction, on page 13. It may be easier to think of fictocriticism, not as a literary genre, but more as a way to process thought—“a strategy for writing” (Kerr and Nettelbeck 4). The majority of explanations of fictocriticism, my own attempts included, are inconclusive. They either overcomplicate the idea, or the language used to describe it is too figurative or metaphorical. Hazel Smith’s explanation in “The Erotics of Gossip: Fictocriticism, Performativity, Technology” (2009) is well-balanced in that sense and probably the best description found so far to explain the concept:

      fictocriticism juxta-poses creative and academic writing environments, and breaks down their separation and autonomy. Fictocritics may, for example, insert, imply, or elucidate theoretical ideas within creative work without feeling the pressure to transform those ideas into entirely fictional or poetic texts. Such texts can take many different forms, but may often be experimental and discontinuous: for example, fictional or poetic sections are juxtaposed with theoretical interjections so that they reverberate with each other. Or, fictocritical critics may attempt to disrupt the formality of the academic essay with strategies such as crossing of genres, collage, non-linearity, wordplay, anecdote, or use of the first person. (1001-02)

      The initial and primary appeal of fictocriticism was its resistance to having any kind of authority dictated over its form, a creative structure that aspires to the convenience of being inherently freeform (Gibbs 310): “There is no specific way to write fictocritically” (Naismith 24). Fictocriticism is referred to as a genre that is about “personal journey and storytelling” (Hancox and Muller 149) and that “the form is part of the message” (Flavell 186). It is an unorthodox writing technique because of the level of literary iconoclasm. To offer any deep level of critical explanation or attempting to cage the creative work within any kind of accepted writing parameter goes against the grain and meaning of its intention as a literary form of writing or ‘device’—a tool for the erratic construction and personalised investigation of journal-like ‘meaning’ (Flavell 29).

      When fictocriticism appears in anthologies, articles, in the introductions of theses and the like, it is usually something that is explained fictocritically, which is typically personalised, abstracted and mixed in style, genre, form, etc. Yes, “ficto-criticism is indeed a slippery and contradictory category” (Flavell 126). But this is what makes it such an exuberant and stimulating mode. Furthermore, it is particularly useful in being able to construct a fragmentary narrative that is in part abstract, creative and autobiographical but then also a narrative(s) which features some critique regarding the explicit themes or issues addressed. Fictocriticism allows a writer to ebb, flow and move through and between these different primary voices to render a richer narrative.

      A detailed review of the literature surrounding fictocriticism and its predecessors shows that there are terms that exist in other countries that have a suggestive fictocritical air about them. In Japan there is Shishōsetsu or the ‘I-novel’, a confessional form of writing that promoted transparency and textual interconnectivity between writer, narrator and narrative hero in early twentieth-century Japanese fiction (Layoun 158). Shishōsetsu encouraged authorial presence and ‘sincerity’, just as fictocriticism encourages authorial involvement and engagement in its ‘storytelling’ form (Layoun 159).

      In the writing of Québecoise women there is fiction-theory or fiction-théorique, as seen in the works of Nicole Brossard—someone who “has had considerable impact on the development of creative-critical writing in English Canada”, having influence in the development of a “very specific creative-critical style” on the margins of Canadian culture (Flavell 215).

      Paul Dawson, an Australian academic, in “A Place for the Space Between: Fictocriticism and the University” (2002), states that the North American version of fictocriticism would be called “confessional criticism” (145):

      confessional criticism is … indebted to the post-structuralist critique of critical and philosophical modes of writing as metalanguages, and the subsequent rejection of the epistemological relationship between these modes and an unquestionable truth. If the disinterested and impersonal prose of academic writing can no longer provide access to knowledge, then the intellectual as political subject becomes the only enabling motivation of critical activity. (Dawson 145)

      Essentially, both confessional criticism and fictocriticism aim to distance and liberate criticism from its “parasitical dependence on literature” (Dawson 146).

      There is also “autocritique, the new belletrism, experimental critical writing, narrative criticism, and literary non-fiction” (Flavell 106). Autocritique is a complicated form of self-criticism—a “trendy ‘I’ that beams out at the reader from the ‘personal’ critical essay” (Flavell 274). The new belletrism is another conceptualisation of autobiographical criticism identifying “American ficto-critical moves as a return to an earlier form of the essay (before its appropriation as an academic genre and reincarnation as logical formal writing)” (Flavell 108). Experimental critical writing has been best summed up and expressed by Marianna Torgovnick:

      When writers want to be read they have to be more flexible and take more chances than the standard scholarly style allows: often, they have