Workshop: “Telescopic Text: Creative Writing Workshop” by David Ciccoricco (University of Otago, New Zealand), 24 April 2025, 2h30 pm, Institute for German Studies (6th floor, FLUC). Organization: Doctoral Programme in Materialities of Literatures, MATLIT LAB: Humanities Laboratory, MA in Creative Writing, Centre for Portuguese Literature and Section for Anglo-American Studies.
Telescopic Text: Creative Writing Workshop. This creative writing workshop will be led by visiting Professor David Ciccoricco (University of Otago, New Zealand). Inspired by the heteronymic imagination of Fernando Pessoa and universities named after literary figures, this workshop will first imagine into existence a fictional university. Then we will create fictional assessments for each other, some of which are possible, others impossible, all of which must be completed. A constraint of the exercise will be the use of “telescopic text,” a digital writing platform that allows you to fold words inside other words – and test the possibilities of writing itself in turn.
David Ciccoricco is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. His research draws on cognitive science and philosophy of mind to establish how fictional minds help explain actual ones. His teaching and research on digital fiction and literary games offers hope for the future of the literary imagination in a digital culture. He is the author of Reading Network Fiction (2007), a book on pre-Web and Web-based digital fiction, and Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media (2015), which is focused on cognitive approaches to narrative and literary theory in print novels, digital narratives, and story-driven videogames.