'As a genre that confounds the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, fictocriticism continues to gain currency. It solves a problem for researchers and writers who do not wish to be held to that somewhat artificial division, and who consider their research methods necessarily to include the stylistic experiments that show their research and thought processes. Research, knowledge of the world, that continues to be ‘written up’, ‘after the fact’ in the usual academic genres, has a tendency to re-inscribe the status quo. The world stays the way it is; change, surprise and experiment elude the writer. ' (Publication summary)
Table of Contents
Introduction: What is Fictocritical Writing?
Part I: Indigenous Australia
1. Don McLeod’s Law: The Genesis of the Aboriginal Concept of the Strike
2. The Mother’s Day Protest
3. The Great Tradition: Translating Durrudiya’s Songs
4. Can you Argue with the Honeysuckle?
Part II: After Critique
5. Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgement
6. Reproductive Aesthetics: Multiple Realities in a Seamus Heaney Poem
7. An experiment with truth and beauty in cultural studies
Part III: Speculative Histories
8. A Diplomat for the History Wars
9. Speculating with History: The Wreck of the Sydney Cove
10. A Touching and Contagious Captain Cook: Thinking History through Things
Part IV: Ecologies of Place
11. The composition and decomposition of commodities: the colonial careers of coal and ivory
12. Picture that Cyclone
13. Berlin Babylon
14. I Had a Dream in Tropical Islands Resort in Berlin. Was it Real?
Conclusion/ Bibliography
'The Mother’s Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays by Stephen Muecke is the latest contribution to Rowman and Littlefield’s series Place, Memory and Affect. The aim of this series is ‘to forge an agenda for new approaches to the edgy relations of people and place within the transnational global cultures of the twenty-first century and beyond’. This collection of Muecke’s essays offers a unique geo-philosophical, non-humanist approach to these relations, firmly planted in discussion of a wild array of places, events and things. Their insights into issues of climate change, indigeneity, protest, colonial history, critique and more engage readers in new ways with debates in Indigenous Studies, Environmental Humanities, History and Philosophy.' (Introduction)
'The Mother’s Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays by Stephen Muecke is the latest contribution to Rowman and Littlefield’s series Place, Memory and Affect. The aim of this series is ‘to forge an agenda for new approaches to the edgy relations of people and place within the transnational global cultures of the twenty-first century and beyond’. This collection of Muecke’s essays offers a unique geo-philosophical, non-humanist approach to these relations, firmly planted in discussion of a wild array of places, events and things. Their insights into issues of climate change, indigeneity, protest, colonial history, critique and more engage readers in new ways with debates in Indigenous Studies, Environmental Humanities, History and Philosophy.' (Introduction)
