The art of reading fiction is probably one of the most understated intellectual practices of our time – a practice that requires creative artistic passion and invention to re-activate and re-animate the written text through reading. Fiction, it seems, is the secret undercurrent of our desire for other moods and encounters with characters, for a peculiar garden of many times to blossom for a prolonged moment of timelessness in the midst of our everyday. We enter fiction on the train, in the transitions between spaces, when the kids are in bed. We live its intensities, cry with its protagonists, anticipate futures through its signs, and become someone else through fiction.

Writing has always been a collective process, while reading is often a lonely endeavor. For Reading Fiction and Its Theoretical Monster Prodigies we want to begin reading fiction together, discussing it and working with it, a process that occurs in the circulation between the two poles of writing and reading, with its infinity of loops and ripples and leaps in which writing becomes reading, and reading becomes writing. Fiction, we suggest, plunges us into the virtual that constitutes a vital part of our reality. We want to explore fiction’s multiple temporalities while reading, thinking, talking and writing collectively, drawing lines from the power of fiction to our own creative practices. From reading, we might start drawing, scribbling, doodling, writing, typing, reading aloud to one another, co-writing, or (why not?) singing each other’s re-collection of words and their lines and figures. The possibilities are plentiful.

Reading Fiction and Its Theoretical Monster Prodigies arises from an urgency to activate forms of écriture collective, of a new wave of creative encounters with language that becomes the other of itself, a stranger to itself, capable of re-animating the power of fiction to shape the real.

The format is open to your active involvement, aiming at collaborations in and through fiction. Everyone is welcome to add new material and suggest practical experiments. Periodically, we will look back and think of ways to share our investigations with a public.

For the first session of Écriture Collective – Fabulous Fiction we propose to read excerpts of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, pp. 5-23.

Please note the change in the time: 20:00h, to accommodate those of you who would like to attend Étienne Balibar's lecture at ZHdK before that.

In this third session we will read Edgar Allan Poe's The Man of the Crowd. In the following sessions we will return to it from different angles, exploring its rhizome of interaction with theory and fiction alike, in the genealogy from Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Gabriel Tarde and Walter Benjamin to Elias Canetti and Bruno Latour, or Gilbert Simondon, Donna Haraway or Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Other texts are welcome that can contribute to the diagram, from Science Fiction to microbiological and cosmological scientific texts, philosophy, and contemporary theoretical and fictional writing with new perspectives on the social, which connect the subjects of crowds, swarms, packs, colonies of bacteria, and celestial clusters!

In this fourth session we will start investigating lines that can take us from Edgar Allan Poe's The Man of the Crowd to other texts, and back. We will return to it from different angles, exploring its rhizome of interaction with theory and fiction alike, in the genealogy from Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Gabriel Tarde and Walter Benjamin to Elias Canetti and Bruno Latour, or Gilbert Simondon, Donna Haraway or Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Other texts are welcome that can contribute to the diagram, from Science Fiction to microbiological and cosmological scientific texts, philosophy, and contemporary theoretical and fictional writing with new perspectives on the social, which connect the subjects of crowds, swarms, packs, colonies of bacteria, and celestial clusters!

We will start on this endeavor by reading Jorge Luis Borges' A New Refutation of Time, which is a text that in this context can be seen as a bridge between Poe's piece and Benjamin's Flâneur, about strolling the urban space in the middle of the night, in search of lost or wasted time.

We expect not only to read, but also to write, draw, intervene, or display.