Fictocritical innovations in creative and academic writing: Four theses

This creative writing dissertation interrogates the author’s corpus of fictocritical writing within the ambit of four contemporary sociocultural landscapes: journeys; family; education; and technology or living in an increasingly digital age. Within four separate discursive investigations, the author questions the nature and form of fictocriticism through the production and (psycho)analysis of a variety of creative literary structures ranging across various writing forms from prose poetry and autoethnography to flash fiction and narcissistic critique. A broad array of techniques are examined as fictocriticism has become a revolutionary “genre-crossing, genre-subverting, and genre-defying” form (Haas 17). Evaluating fictocriticism as both an artform and as a vehicle for higher theory and criticism, this dissertation contends that the genre warrants further academic attention, not only in literary and creative writing studies, but potentially across a plethora of social, artistic, scientific, educational, political and historical fields. The ultimate goal of this research project is to provide new and expanded reading tools that both explain the subjectivity and context of fictocritical writings and simultaneously innovate the form of fictocriticism. The central subject of the author’s experimental fictocritical stories is a young male Polish-Australian, who offers perspectives of his personal experience in four separate areas of his life. Each of these areas is examined and analysed in one of four distinct sections. The creative writings are considered ‘experimental’ because they test and play with the format of fictocritical writings while dissecting the fictocritical form. This study has been conducted in order to address the following research questions: What is fictocriticism, and what can it do? Is there a universal definition of fictocriticism? Can fictocriticism function within both academic and creative writing practices? Can it be merged with other mediums and fields? Is it a methodology that can still evolve? Has fictocriticism changed over the years to become more dynamic, or has it become more ambiguous? Can fictocriticism be better categorised and synthesised? What boundaries are necessary to sustain it as a legitimate methodology in academia? Each of the four individual exegetical theses in this dissertation use a broad variety of writers and their texts to explore a different sociocultural area, revealing an unexplored gap in the research on fictocriticism. This is a critical issue when considering what fictocriticism can contribute to literature and academic understanding. There is also an essential paradox between the theory surrounding fictocriticism suggesting how ‘freeform’ it is, and how non-freeform it still seems to be due to its lack of theoretical ‘rules’. A detailed literature review explains the nature of fictocriticism, considering texts from fictocriticism’s predecessors as well as looking at creative contemporary works that engage with the four primary sociocultural issues. Finally, this dissertation provides a new understanding of fictocriticism through the interrogation of original creative pieces devoted to the issue of the contemporary self, offering a reinvigoration of fictocriticism as a writing strategy.