Academic literature on the topic 'Fictocriticism'

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’.

The current cultural climate, theoretical developments, the changing state of the tertiary institution, and the increasing presence of voices from the margin have contributed to the critical re-evaluation of academic writing as a way of knowing and representing the world. At the same time, hybrid forms of writing, those that exist in the interstices of established generic codes, are experiencing increased critical attention. Yet, despite the fact that genre has become an inadequate notion to describe boundary-crossing writing, little appears to have shifted in the way these forms are understood. Dominant methodologies tend to render what is between less visible or valid, and they define this space only in terms of its relation to set borders. Located at the boundaries of what is familiar and unfamiliar, “writing-between” is a contentious space where elements are combined without clear rules to aid identification. In this thesis the term “ficto-criticism” is used broadly to describe generically transgressive writing that blurs the defining lines between creative and critical texts. The thesis explores the political and theoretical implications of writing-between through a discussion of Australian and Canadian work in English (or English translation), which display the characteristics of the ficto-critical form. This thesis argues for a critical understanding of ficto-criticism that conceptualises it as a highly political strategy of literary intervention, rather than as a mere trend toward cross-genre writing. Indeed, rather than understanding it as surface play, the thesis argues that ficto-critical practice is deeply troubled by the oppressive role of academic writing and that, significantly, its emergence was highly influenced by postcolonial and feminist theory. Thus, ficto-critical practice interrogates the violence of representation and explores what is left out and or misrepresented through that process. The thesis applies Deleuze and Guattari’s concept-tools to articulate a methodology by virtue of which desire and ficto-criticism are understood as productive forms that are liberated from an equation of lack. The tension between ficto-criticism as an open practice and the tradition of scholarly writing, which requires a clear fixed proposition and outcomes, mirrors the project of ficto-criticism, which seeks to unlearn one’s authority and privilege as the beginning of a process towards developing an ethical relationship with the other.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Sydney, 2008.
A thesis submitted to the University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, Writing and Society Research Group in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis is a response to the abstract phenomenon of bereavement as well as to the death of an actual beloved. It situates mourning as ethically and politically significant, reading it as an instance of crisis for the bereaved subject as well as for the culture in which she is located. Via theorists as diverse as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, Dominick LaCapra and Donald Winnicott, the thesis considers the enabling potential that is implicated in this crisis. It suggests that mourning has the capacity to manifest productively as a form of localised intervention or "revolt" that simultaneously invigorates the inner life of the subject and subverts certain ideological aspects of contemporary, Western culture. In particular, the thesis suggests that the significance of productive mourning lies in its capacity to attenuate, via an anti-elegiac approach to narrative, the normative discourse of "identity", a crucial element of the discursive network that sustains a socio-political system mired in the "truth" of liberal individualism. Productive mourning facilitates an interrogation of the self-other/subject-object dialectic embedded in Western culture. This interrogation might be conceived as a deconstruction of the subject in its privileged status relative to alterity, the deconstruction of, in other words, "identity" and its processes. The thesis is informed by the author's experience of bereavement and mourning following suicide. Utilising a fictocritical approach, it performs a commentary in addition to an argument, evincing a unique approach to delineating the personal, cultural and ethical significance of loss.

The creative work of this study is a novel-length work of literary fiction called Keeping House (published as Grace's Table, by University of Queensland Press, April 2014). Grace has not had twelve people at her table for a long time. Hers isn't the kind of family who share regular Sunday meals. As Grace prepares the feast, she reflects on her life, her marriage and her friendships. When the three generations of her family come together, simmering tensions from the past threaten to boil over. The one thing that no one can talk about is the one thing that no one can forget. Grace's Table is a moving and often funny novel using food as a language to explore the power of memory and the family rituals that define us. The exegetical component of this study does not adhere to traditional research pedagogies. Instead, it follows the model of what the literature describes as fictocriticism. It is the intention that the exegesis be read as a hybrid genre; one that combines creative practice and theory and blurs the boundaries between philosophy and fiction. In offering itself as an alternative to the exegetical canon it provides a model for the multiplicity of knowledge production suited to the discipline of practice-led research. The exegesis mirrors structural elements of the creative work by inviting twelve guests into the domestic space of the novel to share a meal. The guests, chosen for their diverse thinking, enable examination of the various agents of power involved in the delivery of food. Their ideas cross genders, ages and time periods; their motivations and opinions often collide. Some are more concerned with the spatial politics of where food is consumed, others with its actual preparation and consumption. Each, however, provides a series of creative reflective conversations throughout the meal which help to answer the research question: How can disempowered women take authority within their domestic space? Michel de Certeau must defend his "operational tactics" or "art of the weak" 1 as a means by which women can subvert the colonisation of their domestic space against Michel Foucault's ideas about the functions of a "disciplinary apparatus". 2 Erving Goffman argues that the success of de Certeau's "tactics" depends upon his theories of "performance" and "masquerade" 3; a claim de Certeau refutes. Doreen Massey and the author combine forces in arguing for space, time and politics to be seen as interconnected, non-static and often contested. The author calls for identity, or sense of self, to be considered a further dimension which impacts on the function of spatial models. Yu-Fi Tuan speaks of the intimacy of kitchens; Gaston Bachelard the power of daydreams; and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin gives the reader a taste of the nourishing arts. Roland Barthes forces the author to reconsider her function as a writer and her understanding of the reader's relationship with a text. Fictional characters from two texts have a place at the table – Marian from The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood 4 and Lilian from Lilian's Story by Kate Grenville. 5 Each explores how they successfully subverted expectations of their gender. The author interprets and applies elements of the conversations to support Grace's tactics in the novel as well as those related to her own creative research practice. Grace serves her guests, reflecting on what is said and how it relates to her story. Over coffee, the two come together to examine what each has learned.

[Truncated abstract] This thesis argues that the non-representation and under-representation of mothering in contemporary Australian literature reflects a much wider cultural practice of silencing the mother-as-subject position and female experiences as a whole. The thesis encourages women writers to pay more attention to the subjective experiences of mothering, so that women’s writing, in particular writing on those aspects of women’s lives that are silenced, of which motherhood is one, can begin to refigure motherhood discourses. This thesis examines mother-as-subject from three perspectives: mothering as a corporeal experience, mothering as a psychological experience, and the articulations and silences of mothering-as-subject. It engages with feminist, postmodern and fictocritical theories in its discussion of motherhood as a discourse through these perspectives. In particular, the thesis employs the theoretical works of postmodern feminists Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva in this discussion . . . A fictional narrative also runs through the critical discussion on motherhood. This narrative, Catherine’s Story, gives a personal and immediate voice to the mother-as-subject perspective. In keeping with the nature of fictocriticism, strict textual boundaries between criticism and fiction are blurred. The two modes of writing interact and in the process inform and critique each other.

In this practice-led research project I work to show how a re-reading and a particular form of listening to the sound-riddled nature of Gertrude Stein's work, Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother, presents us with a contemporary theory of sound in language. This theory, though in its infancy, is a particular enjambment of sounded language that presents itself as an event, engaged with meaning, with its own inherent voice. It displays a propensity through engagement with the 'other' to erupt into love. In this thesis these qualities are reverberated further through the work of Seth Kim-Cohen's notion of the non-cochlear, Simon Jarvis's notion of musical thinking, Jean-Jacques Lecercle's notion of délire or nonsense, Luce Irigaray's notion of jouissant love and the Bracha Ettinger's notion of the generative matrixial border space. This reading then is simultaneously paired with my own work of scoring and creating a digital opera from Stein's work, thereby testing and performing Stein's theory. In this I show how a re-reading and relistening to Stein's work can be significant to feminist ethical language frames, contemporary philosophy, sonic art theory and digital language frames. Further significance of this study is that when the reverberation of Stein's engagements with language through sound can be listened to, a pattern emerges, one that encouragingly problematizes subjectivity and interweaves genres/methods and means, creating a new frame for sound in language, one with its own voice that I call soundage.

Major work and exegesis
(Pleasure/Bliss: terminologically, there is always a vacillation- I stumble, I err. In any case, there will always be a margin of indecision; the distinction will not be the source of absolute classifications, the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be precarious, revocable, reversible: the discourse incomplete.) —Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (4). Marion May Campbell proposes that fictocriticism depends upon a “…queering of borders” and an “… auto-fictional desire (that) pressures the critic” (Campbell “Waterspout” 282) to produce the hybrid text. This pressure, I contend, is the cumulative effect of text upon the body which, through reading and subsequent writing, is the basis of the fictocritical impulse. This thesis is an exploration of the affective and methodological limits of fictocriticism as a queer research practice. Engaging with contemporary theories of writing memory and the body, Notes from Above Water spirals in and out of narrative and re-iterates itself through the appropriation of the writing-flesh of others (Gibbs “Writing and the”). Utilising the ephemeral textual object of ‘the note’: love note, reminder note, suicide note, research/footnote, preface, epilogue, calendar note, fragment, this work resists traditional narrative and academic prose, un-settling the reader into a deeply fragmented flow of prose, poetry, and fictocritical bents. The text queers (queries) established narrative tropes around the experience of sexual trauma, traumatic grief, queer sexualities and identities. This thesis considers the liberatory prospects that fictocritical writing provides. Fictocriticism acts as a literary and critical alternative to traditional narrative structures of confession and disclosure, and a challenge to the ways in which memoir and autofiction function as rituals of healing. Each chapter of this body of work queerly returns to the, often disguised, site of trauma, desire, and meaning making. It does this through a series of plagiarist montage and subversive modes of quotation from texts which are canonical in their respective fields: Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, Sappho, Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Kathleen Mary Fallon’s Working Hot, and a plethora of other academic, poetic, and narrative works. These texts are the poetic and critical scaffolding that moves this work, building the text’s relationship between grief and critical thinking, between language and pain, memory and minor culture, and contemporary theories of writing the body. The events of this piece unfold as repeated narrative instances: a slap across the face, a kiss in a pub toilet, traumatic birth, traumatic death, sex, picking up, learning to read and learning to write. It has multiple beginnings and conclusions. Through its labyrinth of quotation it reveals the architecture of its own creation. The page that was blank to begin with is now crossed from top to bottom with tiny black characters -letters, words, commas, exclamation marks - and it ́s because of them the page is said to be legible. But a kind of uneasiness, a feeling close to nausea, an irresolution that stays my hand - these make me wonder: do these black marks add up to reality? (Genet “Prisoner of”) Notes from Above Water utilises this same sense of nauseating irresolution. There is no resolution to the dilemma of the text. The writing acquiesces to its own failure: creating a textual body that bears all the signs and marks of the body that was lost, but cannot return the woman, the character, the artist, the queer, to the world outside of text. In its attempt to re-constitute the body of the lover in text, Notes from Above Water, like Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body makes “the page the scene of a radical un-writing and re-writing” (Campbell “Poetic Revolutionaries” 73). The text, like Wittig’s, engages in a “scenographic performance of the body” (Campbell “Poetic Revolutionaries”74) in this case both the body of the writer and the absent body of the deceased. This thesis takes Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality to its logical extreme. Where appropriation, bricolage, quotation, montage, and new work infect and mutate each other through allusion and paratextual co-habitation. This work is influenced by, just as the work of earlier practitioners of Australian women’s experimental writing and fictocriticism was, the French traditions of formal experimentation in the novel which Marion May Campbell suggests can be thought of as “…a prolongation of the modernist avant-garde” (Campbell “Poetic Revolutionaries” 74). Anna Gibbs contends that writing “organises a chaotic world into familiar form” (Gibbs “Vivarium” 244); this thesis organises chaos as chaos, queerly, irreverently, passionately with the weight of words and text juxtaposed by unpoliced absurdity, abjection, and longing.
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2018

The Glossary is a fictocritical work which accompanies the novel, New Moon Through Glass, written for my doctorate that encorporates fiction, poetry, analytic and critical text, and which ‘writes back’ to the novel without the interpretive gesture and in doing so interrogates the art of fiction via a fictocritical critique. The generic glossary (a collection of glosses) encapsulates the ‘interpretive gesture’ par excellence — the hermeneutical exercise that criticism’s role has widely been thought to be. Its earliest, medieval form as a commentary (or series of commentaries), translation or exegesis in the margins of or between the lines of a text, reiterates the glossary’s ostensible purpose to explicate rather than create ‘meaning’. As a fictocritical work, The Glossary therefore both interrupts the monolithic architecture of the text through the techniques of the cut and the stitch, and also, by ‘reading between the lines’ of the novel, provides alternative readings; a space for other voices, other texts. In the process the project repositions the glossary before the novel (a reversal of the usual order) inciting a series of readings and re-readings which establish a practice of critical fictionalising and the fictionalising of the critical and an incitement to read in this manner. In the performance, The Glossary ventures to open this Pandora’s Box and in the process reflects on what, as a practitioner, writing is, what reading is, and what is critical practice and what creative. The Glossary is a performance of a distinction put by Bathes as a ‘thinking through’ rather than ‘a residue of critical thought’ (1985: 284) and therefore demands to be read as a fictocritical The Glossary was arrived at after much research and experimentation in my fiction writing practice with footnotes, asides and summarizing (‘the story so far’ style) prefaces or segues and above all definitions, a fascination which might be summarised by the distinction that Charlotte Brontë drew between writing that was ‘real’ and writing that was ‘true’. Fiction often requires realism in order to ring true, and yet the elements of language that give it force owe nothing to realism — its power lies in its imagery, its symmetry, its poetry all of which foreground textuality and intertextuality in a manner congruent with the fictocritical project. The Glossary, ostensibly there to confirm and stabilise knowledge, language and reading practices, shows, by fictionalising the critical, the dependent ordering and silences through the art of character in this knowledge architecture. Far from keeping an ‘objective’ distance, The Glossary generates a parallel text to the novel in which the voice of the author ‘speaks’, and in doing so has much to say, by its multi-vocal presence, about authorial intentions (and anxieties), slippages, ruptures and textual transparencies, opacities and excess; about the ways in which writing is both knowledge and being, knowing and making. The Glossary grew (rhizomically though not randomly) from textual asides, after thoughts and back stories, parallel and divergent interests, arguments, lyricisms, associations, allusions and theories. Eventually The Glossary became a piece of writing performing what could not ‘make it’ into the work of fiction. That a glossary is made up of ����entries���� proved an enlivening form, which generated a different kind of writing practice and a different kind of writing, perhaps not dissimilar to a web log. In making this comparison I am referencing Kerryn Goldsworthy’s comments that ‘blogging’, as ‘dynamic thinking-in-action’, sets its form apart from traditional writing and ‘creates a shift away from the consumer-producer model’ by destabilising the notion of a one-way transaction, ‘active writer producer to passive reader-consumer’. Each entry in The Glossary is a jumping off point for text to grow either from the point-of-view of the writer or reader, and each item simultaneously encourages a non-linear reading with regard to itself out of which possibilities are generated — as a body of text; the ‘self’ to which it constantly refers — and the novel it appends. The Glossary allows space for ‘undisicplined’ writing which does not conform to the teleological narrative of the thriller genre and in doing so, offers a radically democratic opportunity for the reader (who along with the writer also composes the story) to join in the process and the practice and understand how in ‘working through’ any text we are subconsciously glossing and deducing as we go. Some entries in The Glossary relate to specifics in the novel. Others to novels which haunt the text or other texts dreamed of, wished for or forgotten. Many of the subjects of The Glossary are familiar terms in literary and critical discourse examined in the process of writing. Still others relate to identity and to doubling, as a fictional device, but also as textual possibility. The counterpoint between the two texts — glossary and novel — holds other dialogues and polylogues: the intimate linkage between love and murder or desire and violence; disappearances — both textual and familial; childhood, memory and, motherhood; voice, reading, writing- (as well as reading-)blocks; the flâneur; psychoanalysis and dreams; collage; and the house as a metaphor for the body or the text. Certainly The Glossary presents an occasion for writing, an exercise, an exegesis and, where necessary, an excuse: ‘Only paper offers the tactile complexities of the origami life, the papier mache existence. (The Glossary p. 84)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The Glossary is a fictocritical work which accompanies the novel, New Moon Through Glass, written for my doctorate that encorporates fiction, poetry, analytic and critical text, and which ‘writes back’ to the novel without the interpretive gesture and in doing so interrogates the art of fiction via a fictocritical critique. The generic glossary (a collection of glosses) encapsulates the ‘interpretive gesture’ par excellence — the hermeneutical exercise that criticism’s role has widely been thought to be. Its earliest, medieval form as a commentary (or series of commentaries), translation or exegesis in the margins of or between the lines of a text, reiterates the glossary’s ostensible purpose to explicate rather than create ‘meaning’. As a fictocritical work, The Glossary therefore both interrupts the monolithic architecture of the text through the techniques of the cut and the stitch, and also, by ‘reading between the lines’ of the novel, provides alternative readings; a space for other voices, other texts. In the process the project repositions the glossary before the novel (a reversal of the usual order) inciting a series of readings and re-readings which establish a practice of critical fictionalising and the fictionalising of the critical and an incitement to read in this manner. In the performance, The Glossary ventures to open this Pandora’s Box and in the process reflects on what, as a practitioner, writing is, what reading is, and what is critical practice and what creative. The Glossary is a performance of a distinction put by Bathes as a ‘thinking through’ rather than ‘a residue of critical thought’ (1985: 284) and therefore demands to be read as a fictocritical The Glossary was arrived at after much research and experimentation in my fiction writing practice with footnotes, asides and summarizing (‘the story so far’ style) prefaces or segues and above all definitions, a fascination which might be summarised by the distinction that Charlotte Brontë drew between writing that was ‘real’ and writing that was ‘true’. Fiction often requires realism in order to ring true, and yet the elements of language that give it force owe nothing to realism — its power lies in its imagery, its symmetry, its poetry all of which foreground textuality and intertextuality in a manner congruent with the fictocritical project. The Glossary, ostensibly there to confirm and stabilise knowledge, language and reading practices, shows, by fictionalising the critical, the dependent ordering and silences through the art of character in this knowledge architecture. Far from keeping an ‘objective’ distance, The Glossary generates a parallel text to the novel in which the voice of the author ‘speaks’, and in doing so has much to say, by its multi-vocal presence, about authorial intentions (and anxieties), slippages, ruptures and textual transparencies, opacities and excess; about the ways in which writing is both knowledge and being, knowing and making. The Glossary grew (rhizomically though not randomly) from textual asides, after thoughts and back stories, parallel and divergent interests, arguments, lyricisms, associations, allusions and theories. Eventually The Glossary became a piece of writing performing what could not ‘make it’ into the work of fiction. That a glossary is made up of ����entries���� proved an enlivening form, which generated a different kind of writing practice and a different kind of writing, perhaps not dissimilar to a web log. In making this comparison I am referencing Kerryn Goldsworthy’s comments that ‘blogging’, as ‘dynamic thinking-in-action’, sets its form apart from traditional writing and ‘creates a shift away from the consumer-producer model’ by destabilising the notion of a one-way transaction, ‘active writer producer to passive reader-consumer’. Each entry in The Glossary is a jumping off point for text to grow either from the point-of-view of the writer or reader, and each item simultaneously encourages a non-linear reading with regard to itself out of which possibilities are generated — as a body of text; the ‘self’ to which it constantly refers — and the novel it appends. The Glossary allows space for ‘undisicplined’ writing which does not conform to the teleological narrative of the thriller genre and in doing so, offers a radically democratic opportunity for the reader (who along with the writer also composes the story) to join in the process and the practice and understand how in ‘working through’ any text we are subconsciously glossing and deducing as we go. Some entries in The Glossary relate to specifics in the novel. Others to novels which haunt the text or other texts dreamed of, wished for or forgotten. Many of the subjects of The Glossary are familiar terms in literary and critical discourse examined in the process of writing. Still others relate to identity and to doubling, as a fictional device, but also as textual possibility. The counterpoint between the two texts — glossary and novel — holds other dialogues and polylogues: the intimate linkage between love and murder or desire and violence; disappearances — both textual and familial; childhood, memory and, motherhood; voice, reading, writing- (as well as reading-)blocks; the flâneur; psychoanalysis and dreams; collage; and the house as a metaphor for the body or the text. Certainly The Glossary presents an occasion for writing, an exercise, an exegesis and, where necessary, an excuse: ‘Only paper offers the tactile complexities of the origami life, the papier mache existence. (The Glossary p. 84)

‘Parallax’ is a hybrid creative writing PhD thesis comprised of two interrelated parts – the novel ‘After and Before Now’, and its accompanying exegesis ‘Experiencing the Ekphrastic Imaginary’. Both novel and exegesis are concerned with notions of multiplicity and simultaneity as they relate to acts of creation, transformation and to ideas of the self. ‘After and Before Now’ is an ekphrastic novel exploring connections between creativity and selfhood through the experiences of its central protagonist, young visual artist Lola Hayward. The three-part narrative centres on the opening night of an exhibition to which Lola has contributed three main works. The novel’s formal structure is circu-linear, with a kaleidoscopic approach to narrative point-of-view that utilises first, second and third person perspectives to examine and represent the idea of the multifaceted self. The imagined art objects function as temporal touchstones, entry points through which narrative burrows into the present moment, into the memories and projections of events and ideas formative and transformative, gateways to those shadow-selves that continue to underlie and inform Lola’s attempts to understand her own being and becoming. ‘Experiencing the Ekphrastic Imaginary’ is a fictocriticial essay investigating the processes of writing the novel, with a particular focus on its imagined art objects, and on the representation of creative praxis. Contemporary ekphrastic fiction and theory are surveyed within the context of the search for an appropriate framework and language for the exegetical discussion. Exploration of and experimentation with the temporal/spatial possibilities and constraints of the ekphrastic mode are described in the context of the novel’s treatment of the interconnected narrative spheres of structure, tense and perspective. The creation of the novel’s structure is also explicated through a discussion of the relationship between literary theory and quantum theory. The notion of slippage – between author and narrator, truth and fiction, art and self – is linked to the concept of the transformative act of selfhood. Both texts engage with and explore techniques of discontinuity, destabilisation, intertextuality and self-reflexivity in order to seek out strategies for and methods of representing the interdependent, indissoluble nature of the relationship between the creative process and the transformative self.
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2011

Part art history essay, part experimental fiction, part theoretical manifesto on the politics of equivalence, Helicography examines questions of scale in relation to Robert Smithson’s iconic 1970 artwork Spiral Jetty. In an essay and film made to accompany the earthwork, Smithson invites us to imagine the stone helix of his structure at various orders of magnitude, from microscopic molecules to entire galaxies. Taking up this invitation with an unrelenting and literal enthusiasm, Helicography pursues the implications of such transformations all the way to the limits of logic. If other spirals, from the natural to the man-made, were expanded or condensed to the size of Spiral Jetty, what are the consequences of their physical metamorphoses? What other equivalences follow in turn, and where do their surprising historical, cultural, and mechanical connections lead? This book considers a number of forms in order to find out: the fluid vortices of whirlpools, hurricanes, and galaxies; the delicate shells of snails and the threatening pose of rattlesnakes; prehistoric ferns and the turns of the inner ear; the monstrous jaws of ancient sharks; a baroque finial scroll on a bass viol; a 19th-century watch spring; phonograph discs and spooled film; the largest open-pit mine on the planet. The result is a narrative laboratory for the “science of imaginary solutions” proposed by Alfred Jarry (whose King Ubu also plays a central role in the story told here), a work of fictocriticism blurring form and content, and the story of a single instant in time lost in the deserts of the intermountain west.

Influenced by the arguments discussed in the previous chapter, as well as Brian Massumi’s ‘The Autonomy of Affect’ (1995, 2002, 2015), critics such as Nigel Thrift (2007) and John Law (2004) argue that creative genres of representation, such as fiction and performance, are more affective and can thus access the visceral truth of experience better than scientific and critical methods. Analysing the proposals of Thrift, Law, and fictocriticism, this chapter explores why certain methods are deemed to be more creative than others, and therefore, more in touch with embodied experience. Highlighting some of the persistent tensions in these method proposals, I argue that we should reconsider the social purchase of critical attention and what Paul Ricoeur called ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’. To do this, the chapter locates an intriguing parallel between a public fascination with conspiracy culture and secrecy and affect theory’s concerns about unseen agencies and atmospheres. Indeed, the bestselling novels and most watched television programs of our times present popular representations of ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’. Read in social context, the divisions between critical and creative or common forms of attention become less resolute. Critique can be seen as socially impelled, rather than socially redundant.