“Criticism is itself an art.” – Oscar Wilde

A couple of months ago I shared a list of “Five Works of Theory You Should Consider Reading,” at least two fifths of which could also easily be described as criticism (Glas viz Genet, and Crack Wars viz Flaubert, for sure). Boundaries, of course, are porous.

As if it’s not obvious, I love reading theory and criticism. Two forthcoming books I can’t wait to read are Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents) and Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard University Press), both due out in October. Criticism? Theory? Poetry, fiction, autobiography? If their previous work is any indication, the only label worth applying will be “badass.”

Similar to my theory choices, I could’ve picked a hundred dozen or more, so limiting myself to five seems like a good, if difficult, idea. And, like last time, I cheated and added a bunch of alternative choices within the five major choices. Ah the joy of making up the rules as you go.

For the most part, I chose the books I chose because I like them for the way they play with genre, the way they enact formal deterritorialization, the way they make the criticism itself a work of art, or as Wilde puts it in the essay I quoted from above, “It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation.”

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It always surprises me when creative people admit they don’t enjoy reading theory. Aside from the bountiful inspiration of ideas it provides, certain theoretical works can also inspire formal techniques. For proof, check out E.M. Cioran’s approach to the philosophical prose poem in something like The Temptation to Exist or A Short History of Decay. Or check out Luce Irigaray’s lyricism in This Sex Which Is Not One. Tons of other examples abound, from Baudrillard’s fragments to Benjamin’s montages, Blanchot’s récits to Bataille’s grotesques.

Part of the aversion to theory, as far as I can tell, comes from the mistaken assumption that the genre we call theory should be read differently than the genres we call fiction or poetry, because it’s “critical” rather than “creative.” On the contrary, I think it’s quite productive to read theory as if it were poetry or fiction, which is to say as if its primary function was to affect rather than educate.

I recognize that my position is contentious. I’ve taken heat in the past for advising people to suspend their desire for comprehension while reading theory. For reasons unknown, some readers still think understanding a text is important. I’m not one of those people. I read theory and fiction and poetry to experience, to consider, to become other, to shift, to mutate, to change. I most certainly do not read those things to understand them.

What follows are five works that lend themselves to a reading strategy conducive to works of fiction or poetry. Granted, between poetry and fiction a demarcation is said to exist, and granted some read the one different than the other, and granted different styles within different genres require different heuristics, I think readers would benefit from considering the following works as “creative” rather than merely “critical.”

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