Pawel Cholewa

This book provides a new understanding of fictocriticism—a genre stemming from metafiction, écriture feminine, and postmodernism—via original creative and experimental writing devoted to the issue of the contemporary self, offering a reinvigoration of fictocriticism as a writing strategy. Cholewa explores questions surrounding what fictocriticism is and what it can do, and the essential paradox between theories surrounding fictocriticism suggesting how ‘freeform’ it is, yet how non-freeform and chameleonic it still seems to be due to its lack of theoretical ‘rules’. Evaluating fictocriticism as both an art form and as a vehicle for higher theory and criticism, he offers and proposes further academic attention across a plethora of sociocultural, artistic, scientific, educational, political, and historical fields. Propelled by the work(s) of Roland Barthes, the ‘godfather of fictocriticism’, the ultimate goal of this research and text is to provide new and expanded reading tools that both explain the subjectivity and context of fictocritical writings and simultaneously innovate on the form.

Dr Pawel Cholewa studied Creative Arts and Writing, Language, Communication and Culture at CQUniversity Australia.

“The work engages one through its sense of energy and commitment, its comic tone and style, and its heightened self-awareness.”—Dr Moya Costello, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University

“Hilarious, moving, wonderfully idiotic in a masterful writerly way … simply a very good contemporary, multicultural take on the appalled (almost) European (almost) intellectual in Australia wondering not about life and death but road trains and how to get a promise about time via texting … and the casual way our European ancestors pass on magic and hate and a version of heteronormativity!”—Professor Katrina M. Schlunke, School of Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Tasmania

“This book reinforces the idea that fact and fiction are inseparable, a crucial analysis in this era of fake news. And it shows, surprisingly, how this set of cutting-edge problems can be approached subjectively.”—Stephen Muecke, Professor of Creative Writing, Flinders University, South Australia