Cathryn Perazzo is a PhD candidate at Deakin University. For her practice-led PhD, she is working on a novel and exegesis. Her research interests include creative writing theory and practice-led research. Cathryn's other writing interests span poetry, short story and life writing. She has published short works of both fiction and non-fiction. Cathryn is a member of Poets of Odd: a group of poets with publishing credits who have also jointly edited and produced an anthology of their work, The cat and the philosopher went for a walk.

Dr Patrick West is a Senior Lecturer in Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University, Melbourne. His short-story collection, The world swimmers, was published by The International Centre for Landscape and Language, Edith Cowan University, Perth, in 2011. The Australian’s reviewer wrote that The world swimmers contains ‘incredible insight into the human condition throughout.’ In 2012 Patrick wrote and co-produced the 27 minute fictional-documentary film Sisters of the sun (directed by Simon Wilmot).

 

Towards a ‘Non-Didactic Didacticism’ of the Sociopolitical

Assemblages and the Event in 'Surface Tension' and ‘Shame’

To write sociopolitical fiction is to be caught in an odd double bind. The term itself, ‘sociopolitical’ (hyphenated or not), implies an ‘assemblage’, and the terms it combines—‘the social’ and ‘the political’—each suggest complex, worldly assemblages. However, the more the writer attempts to express the assembled complexity of the sociopolitical domain, the more he/she feels a tug in the other direction: towards the version of ideas that might best explain the sociopolitical world and motivate political action. This article engages with the aesthetic and political challenges that arise in writing within a genre in which, to some extent at least, a moral content is desired by readers as an explanation for sociopolitical issues, only to be resisted when, as it often does, it becomes didactic. Co-author Cathryn Perazzo’s sociopolitical novel-in-progress, Surface Tension, is, we suggest, a laboratory of an assemblage in action. In it, we test and elaborate our hypothesis of the ‘assembled idea’ or ‘assembled morality’ of the sociopolitical novel. We conclude with a look at a published short story, ‘Shameʼ, by co-author Patrick West, which similarly deals with the sociopolitical, with how ‘non-didactic didacticisms’ might be germinated, and, most explicitly, with the ‘event’, following Deleuze’s use of this term.