A UNSWriting event with Anne Brewster, Denis Byrne, Meaghan Morris and Stephen Muecke
IO Myers Studio 15th October 2010
The shift towards fictocritical writing, which has been in part lead from Australia, but is also popular in Canada and the US, is relevant to postgraduate students thinking about how to write their theses. It has professional consequences, since in the evolution of disciplines as ways of organising knowledge, new narrative and analytical norms will change the communicative scene.
Fictocriticism changes what the ‘knowing’ voice sounds like and thus generates an audience which engages differently with the object/problem and its critical remediation.
The workshop is therefore about questions of storytelling and argumentation in the context of archive, authority and field, and their aesthetic mediation.
Academic and professional writers usually have something at stake in their performances, therefore affectively-invested social relations are represented in the objects and scenes they choose to present in the writing.
This one-day event will be about tracking how forms of knowledge are made in relation to what lies outside or beyond them, and how writing can be used to ‘re-world’ intellectual, academic and professional spaces. This workshop involves the performance of some recent work by leading fictocritical writers, cultural studies theorists and professionals. It aims to generate discussion about what critical writing currently does and might come to do. The event will be structured with plenary sessions and writing ‘labs’ where the participants present their own writing for discussion in small groups. Participants will be asked to contribute a 2,000 word paper for workshopping (by September 17th?) Key readings will be available electronically and should be read before the event.
Write to Anne Brewster a.brewster@unsw.edu.au to express interest in attending this free event.
See here for a list of recommended readings.