Fictocritical Innovations. Pawel Cholewa

context or diaspora in the history of some Polish/Australian (migrant) writing, and contextualising the author’s European-migrant ancestry and biased millennial voice, in a memoir-like narrative.

      Folio One and Thesis One can be seen as diluting or bleeding into Folio Two and Thesis Two. They are both exegetical about my creative work (and comparing it to similar works) and they make their own distinct arguments. They (the folios and the theses) are alike and are about the nomad, who simultaneously cannot find his place at home with family, and who cannot escape himself abroad in the tangible and intangible pursuit of travel either. Hence, these sections remain inescapably hybridised in a way that I hope readers will not dislike.

      Folio Three is about education and how the creative self was formally educated. It recalls specific experiences of being a Bachelor of Arts and Education (Secondary) undergraduate student at university from 2006 to 2010. The majority of the anecdotal, creative or abstract prose inserted into this folio relates to the narrator rebelling against some of his tertiary experiences, in a state of angst, hopefully creating a more compelling psychodrama within the narrative. It is where the idea of ‘purposeful purposelessness’ is most clearly introduced as a storytelling technique and narrative framework. The state of flux the creative self experiences in this folio stems from and identifies the same restlessness and exuberant anxiety, which arise from the culturally conflicted background of the first two folios, and which continue to pervade thematically into this folio and throughout this study overall. It utilises and adapts modes of fictocriticism inspired by Drusilla Modjeska’s The Orchard (1994) and other elemental fictocritical writings and theories by Anne Brewster, Katrina Schlunke, but primarily Anna Gibbs and her uninhibited enumerative, rhythmic, poetic and splicing approach to writing. Thesis Three uncovers some concrete and unambiguous traits of fictocriticism in its connections to education and pedagogy (Modjeska 1994; Brewster 2013), its similarities to more established academic modes like autoethnography (Walford 2004), its phraseology (Gibbs 311; Brewster 2013) and its observable need for a clear “narrative point” (Gibbs 2).

      The title of Thesis Four, “Solutionism: Fictocriticism and the Digital World”, is derived from concepts by Evgeny Morozov (2012, 2013) and his wariness of technology. This sets a tone for this thesis’ corresponding folio and fictocriticism’s meandering inconclusive ways. The ‘experimental’ writing focuses on the disengagement contemporary society has with political news and information because of a preference for other, less intellectually challenging forms of entertainment offered by cable television, streaming movies, Netflix, digitised porn and the whole YouTube phenomenon. These ‘arguments’ also encompass the negative impacts of the Internet and social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Thesis Four investigates some of the precise adaptations and changes that have occurred in fictocritical writing over time, particularly in the new millennium, contextualising the methodology in a more modern, technological, or ‘robotic’ era. This thesis shows how some of the fragmentary and freeform writings of Anna Gibbs, Marion Campbell and Alison Bartlett for instance, located in The Space Between, later began to exist in other tangible, less ambiguous mediums and forms, and how the vision of early pioneering fictocritics such as Anna Gibbs, Drusilla Modjeska, Amanda Nettelbeck and Heather Kerr, gradually evolved from their vague, unencumbered, yet highly ‘meta’ fictocritical beginnings, to the more deliberate and industrious “electric fictocriticism” (Robb 100) of the twenty-first century.

      All of these folios incorporate different experimental writing techniques, including first-person narrative, prose-poetry, flash fiction, travel writing, vignettes, stream of consciousness, memoir, autobiography, fiction, creative non-fiction, autoethnography, song lyrics, mantras/meditations, narcissistic critique, storytelling, double-voicedness and soliloquy. The folios also use different voices, personas or narrators depending on what the folio and thesis are trying to portray and uncover. Yet all of these approaches can tentatively fall under the methodological umbrella of fictocriticism as the genre has quite a broad (possibly limitless) scope, particularly for experimentation. Still, the folios arguably becomes progressively more fictocritical as the theses develop and sustain their arguments about fictocritical innovations and discoveries, and as the creative self uncovers subtextual layers and improves upon the necessary critique in the folios. In this ‘confused’ way the folios are not entirely elegant or aesthetically pleasing. They incorporate their own mistakes and inconsistencies throughout the narrative, just as Mark Z. Danielewski preserves his mistakes and crossings out throughout House of Leaves (114-15).

      In these creative works, however, I at least attempt to (consistently) employ the fictocritical solution to the ‘failure’ of the formal omniscient and/or masterful position, the view from nowhere, because now it is more accepted that knowledge is situational and contextual. Again, this partly stems from the feminist influence of fictocriticism, with its emphasis on the personal being political. Other solutions (and innovations) will be examined within the context of this exploration’s theses, as I/we progress through them.

      Regarding viewpoints, because of the massive variations in my creative pieces’ lengths and styles/forms (there are many), not every narrator or scene in every one of the creative works is permitted a concrete (physical) description. This is done to save space and time. After all, for the record, basically all of the narrators/personas are more or less ‘reflections’ (‘ghosts’) of the same being/author (me) anyway. Also, as indicated by Haas, one of the common fictocritical markers is “minimal characterisation and dialogue” (26), which I tend to agree with (overall). That is not to say that my creative works do not feature dialogue and character description at all. These traits feature very prominently in the folios on family and education in particular, but dialogue and character description are not the focus here, as there are many other bases to cover, and more importantly to ‘play’ with, in order to uncover the breadth of fictocriticism’s potential, and what possible innovations lay dormant within it.

      Taking this broad approach further, occasionally some of the creative pieces are left ‘seemingly’ unfinished, to indicate where the creative self could (or does not) elaborate on a concept because it would make it less or more fictocritical. This makes aspects of the folio work open-ended. An argument against this approach could be that it demonstrates a lack of texture, and intellectual resources, in the writing. Though it is this book’s contention that the creative folios certainly did not need to be completely polished pieces of work. In fact, aesthetic and commercial sleekness was deliberately resisted so that the work would be more experimental. This became the plan and methodology following this study’s first draft. This restructuring or deconstructive process became part of this book’s reviewed and renewed goals. This would ensure that this ‘experiment’ in fictocriticism was more official. And in reviewing the creative self’s work the analytical self is then able to better take on the responsibilities of a literary scientist in the more theoretical theses.

      The open-ended nature of the ‘experimental’ creative folios make it so the works cannot be considered pure memoir or autobiography as they are, in essence, abstract(ed) and fictionalised accounts. Though they contain obvious elements of these forms, particularly Folios One and Two, where pseudonyms and leeway are given to the expression and dramatisation of real people, places and events, the creative work(s) do not subscribe to any one genre exclusively. The creative works must be considered a fictocritical ‘experiment’ because of the blending of so many differing genres and forms. Most importantly, the folios must be fictocritical because, as a whole, they are essentially half-creative, half-critical.

      Finally, by 2018-19 my literature review found that there are only a small number of theses devoted to a personally exploratory and/or specifically fictocritical, critical or ‘fictocritical-esque’ hybridised methodology. These include Monique Louise Trottier’s Masters thesis “If Truth be Told…” (2002), The Holocaust at Home: Representations and Implication of Second Generation Experience (2004), a North American doctoral dissertation by Susan Jacobowitz about the literary experiences, identities and representations of second generation Holocaust survivors (iv); Brent Jason Royster’s “The Construction of Self in the Contemporary Creative Writing Workshop: A Personal Journey” (2006), Jeanette Weeda-Zuidersma’s “Keeping Mum: Representations of Motherhood in Contemporary Australian Literature—a Fictocritical Exploration” (2007), “Between the City and the Bush: Suburbia in the Contemporary