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.

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 thesis focuses on representations of Indigeneity by non-Indigenous writers and in particular the author's practice in the writing of a children's novel, in which the relationship between non-Indigenous and Indigenous characters is represented as part of a colonial and post-colonial, contemporary world. The exegesis takes an experimental approach to representing theory in a fictocritical, multi-genre form.

[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.

viii Abstract This thesis uses James Agee's 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to examine the role of so-called fictocriticism in emphasizing the immutability of an author from within a text. The thesis argues that the fictocritical text accounts for the impossibility of extricating the author from writing. Although its precursors date back several centuries- perhaps most notably to Michel de Montaigne-the term fictocriticism was coined in the mid- to late twentieth century to describe texts existing at the interstices of ostensibly fictional and factual genres of writing. Agee's text, borne out of a journalistic assignment for Fortune magazine, blends elements of long-form magazine journalism with lyric poetry with the author's famous sprawling, diaryesque prose, calling the reader to question which elements of the text are rooted in fact and which are simply the author's fabrications or, indeed, whether such a distinction can be drawn. The term can be applied only anachronistically to the 1941 book, yet as defined in these pages it is a befitting description of Agee's otherwise unclassifiable text. Fictocriticism lacks a singular definition, so the examination of Agee's Famous Men as a fictocritical work rests on a thorough revision of the term's history and its lexical implications, both of which...