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Reviewed by:
  • John Schad in Conversation by John Schad and David Jonathan Y. Bayot's
  • Mohammed Hamdan (bio)
A Review of John Schad and David Jonathan Y. Bayot's John Schad in Conversation. ( Manila, Philippines: De La Salle University Publishing House. 2015. 53 pp. $10.00. isbn: 978-971-555-629-3.)

One of the radical breakaways within mainstream literary criticism is John Schad's treatment of critical or nonfiction writing as creative—or what Schad calls "ficto-criticism." In his thought-provoking conversation with David Bayot, Schad takes us to an insightful territory where the critical and fictional finally have "the great train crash." John Schad in Conversation questions and, in fact, blurs the boundary that conventionally separates between various forms of writing such as poetry, autobiography and/or actual self-experience. Indeed, this book invites us to re-explore the novelistic space that traditionally divides critical writing from creative literary works, and to reinterpret the concept of "critical invention" via the parallel reading of factual experience and imaginative text. Schad, to exemplify, manifests the meaning of this space by creating channels of critical-creative negotiations between the personal/factual experience of his father's death, which took place in October 1996 "after a long, fourteen-year decline into premature dementia [later on] declared to be Alzheimer's," and his own reading practice of Jacques Derrida's "Envois" in The Post Card, published in 1980. His father's "fourteen-year decline into premature dementia" can also be doubled by Schad's fourteen-year creative decline into Derrida's "Envois." Not only does Schad treat Derrida's "Envois" as a fictional form of epistolary writing, but he also transforms his loss-of-father event into "a quasi-creative" narrative entitled Someone Called Derrida, published in 2007 and based on his own reading experience of Derrida's "Envois."

This dialogic monograph by Schad, who is a professor of modernism, Victorian literature, and critical-creative writing at Lancaster University, UK, is part of a series including conversations with Christopher Norris [End Page 419] and Jonathan Dollimore. This book, which takes the form of a dialogue between Schad himself and his interviewer Bayot, communicates in spirit with Plato's Socratic dialogues and pushes the limits of creativity beyond the dichotomy between this analytical or that artistic.

The fusion of criticism and fiction is a project of invention that Schad embraces throughout his conversation, taking after Derrida and Walter Benjamin, the "colossal figures—heroes of mine". Both Derrida and Benjamin are exemplars of what Geoffrey Hartman terms "poetics of criticism," or criticism-as-creative. If Derrida's "Envois," to which Schad frequently refers in his discussion, is the site where he dreams his father's death, then Benjamin's suicide in 1940 and messianic note of departure is what throws him [Schad] back into "the now-and-again apocalyptic Christianity of my childhood."

In reshaping the tradition of criticism, Schad reinvestigates the question of reading and the reader's business in relation to the text. Reading, which is that "bastard child of biblical hermeneutics," is also the epicentre of Schad's personal and writing activity. He, in other words, not only situates reading within the experience of self-mirroring but goes so far as to suggest a performative reading which is capable of acting upon individuals and the world they inhabit. Such reading experience generates resonances between Schad-Derrida fathers or Schad-Benjamin childhoods. Schad assures us that "if there is any creativity in my work it is only ever squeezed painfully from the act of reading and, indeed, its feckless twin, misreading." Reading thus is an indispensable compartment in Schad's great-train-crash project. For him, the possibilities of critical inventions are limitless since what is literary includes any text; however, some readers might take issue with that based on their own definition of literature. Whatever one's point of view is, the question that Schad leaves us pondering is: how far can one consider any text literally literary? [End Page 420]

Mohammed Hamdan

mohammed hamdan is an assistant professor of Anglo-American literary studies at An-Najah National University, Palestine. His work focuses on gender studies and nineteenth-century transatlantic forms...

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