Gerrit Haas re-theorises the peculiar textual conduct of ficto/critical writing, which inextricably intersects fictional with critical discourses as well as aesthetics with poetics and ethics. The slash here signals the conjunction between a self-reflexive ficto-critical insight and a wider discursive ficto-critical motivation. In its refined form, this twofold trope shifts perspective from the prevalent generic between onto the meta-generic level of our textual practices. Ultimately, the ficto/critical is thus qualified as an unheard-of interventionist aesthetic of deconstruction directed at the ramifications of our textual cultures.
"The strengths of the work lie in the preparedness to take seriously and to interrogate existing material, whilst providing a genealogy, a set of potential definitions, and a record of key texts and authors. The work is an excellent study of how something comes into being and accounts for the many offshoots and ways of talking about ficto/criticism, which appears to have developed its own fixity." Rosslyn Prosser, TEXT 22/1 (2018)