The Logic of Critifiction

Description

One of the best practitioners of postmodern writing is the celebrated author Raymond Federman. His credo has always been the idea that “to create fiction is, in fact, a way to abolish reality, and especially to abolish the notion that reality is truth.” This paper looks at Federman's poetics of creative writing that relies on the combination of epistemic knowledge with fictional writing through critifiction – a term Federman coined to express the conflagration of fictional and critical discourse – epistemic logic being the motor for the production of meaning in the image of fiction as sense and commonsense. The commonsensical aspect in Federman's fiction is tightly interlinked also with his desire to overcome the trauma of having lost all of his family in the concentration camps at Auschwitz. This traumatic experience becomes for Federman more real the more fictitiously he renders it.