Autofrictions: the fictopoet, the critic and the teacher

The dissolution of boundaries between creative and essay writing overtly or implicitly advocated some thirty years ago in the USA by the 'language poets' and in France by feminist writers has been confirmed by the more recent adoption of the term 'fictocriticism' in Australia. One of the lessons to be learned from such radical works as those gathered in Heather Kerr and Amanda Nettlebeck’s edited collection, 'The Space Between' (1998), is that neither poetic nor critical language can any longer claim to be impervious to the debates that have dominated academic and philosophical thought for the last thirty years. The theoretical and political concerns that inform the speculative and often poetic prose of the women whose work figure in The Space Between, for instance, proves congenial to academics engaged in deconstruction, cultural studies and interdisciplinary approaches to art and literature as well as to teachers of creative writing at tertiary level. The paucity of critical material on this kind of work, however, has the disquieting effect of reminding us that we still lack the critical vocabulary to re-examine the paradoxes built into some of the most exciting work done in Australia over the past few decades, let alone to teach them. This paper investigates the literal, metaphorical and ideological implications of 'hybrid' texts/genres for criticism in general, and for the workshopping of creative work in particular. The question underlying this investigation concerns the place of poetic discourse in fictocriticism. This is consonant with my understanding of genre as 'index and mark' representing ‘the site of the nonsubstitutable positioning of the I and the you and of their modalities of expression’ and of poetic discourse as 'an unsettling process ... of identity of meaning and speaking subject'.