short narratives in response to it.Also interject quotations from, and/or
passages about, theoretical issues. If possible do not simply state a theoret-
ical idea but develop it, or give your own ‘take on it’. Alternatively take a
theoretical text (or several) that you really like, and use the theory to
trigger the writing of fictional or poetic texts. How overt the theory is in a
fictocritical piece is a matter of taste. Fictocriticism can be both ‘explicit’
and ‘implicit’, and a number of pieces in this book could be construed to
be fictocritical while not overtly positioning themselves as such. The
theory may be very prominent in the final text; alternatively it may form
the basis for the piece but be no longer overtly present in the final text.
Fictocritical texts of many different kinds appear in The Space Between
(Kerr and Nettelbeck 1998). Lesley Stern’s The Smoking Book (2001) is
also a good example of sustained fictocritical writing, as is Rachel Blau
DuPlessis’s The Pink Guitar (1990).
Fictocriticism can also parody itself. The American novel House of
Leaves includes a pseudo-academic critical commentary which is made up
of partly spurious, partly real references (Danielewski 2001).
CONCLUSION
This chapter has encouraged you to adopt an irreverent and subversive
approach to genre. Other ways of challenging generic boundaries have been
followed through at various points in the book, for example, in Chapters 6
and 7. You will probably now be able to think of your own ways of bending
and blending genres. A generic mix will be useful to you in developing your
cyberwriting in Chapter 11, and may help you to write the city as a site of
difference in Chapter 12. You may be able to pull together fragments you
have already written in response to previous exercises to create a cross-genre
piece, or you may wish to return to Chapters 5 and 7 to find other ways of
inverting fictional norms. Hopefully you can also use these processes to
question ways in which we encode identity and power relations and to invert
cultural norms. In fact, the subversion of genre is central to an experimen-
tal approach, and the textual and cultural norms it questions. As such it can
be seen to be pivotal to many of the aims and purposes of this book.
REFERENCES
Baranay, I. 1988, ‘Living Alone: The New Spinster (Some Notes)’, Telling Ways:
Australian Women’s Experimental Writing , (eds.) S. Gunew and A. Couani,
–Australian Feminist Studies Publications, Adelaide.
210 The Writing Experiment