ChatGPT said…
Delighted you asked—John Schad is one of the most distinctive practitioners of what we might call literary-critical theory fiction in the UK. His work occupies a liminal space between criticism, fiction, memoir, and performance, making it a rich site for thinking through the potentials of theory fiction—especially in relation to modernism, deconstruction, and theology.
—
Why John Schad’s work can be considered theory fiction:
1. Criticism as Performance/Narrative:
Schad’s writing often begins from an academic or literary-critical premise—studying figures like Derrida, Dickens, or Beckett—but he performs criticism through fiction, rather than writing about texts in the traditional sense.
For instance:
“Someone Called Derrida: An Oxford Mystery” (2007)
This book is part detective novel, part memoir, and part critical reflection. Schad weaves the real-life encounter of Derrida’s visit to Oxford in the 1960s with a fictionalized search for traces of that event.
The result is a literary-critical ghost story, full of hauntings, footnotes, and ironies—very much in the spirit of Derridean deconstruction turned into narrative form.
2. Theological and Existential Stakes:
In texts like “The Late Walter Benjamin” (2012), Schad constructs a fictional encounter in which Benjamin wakes up in a British town in the early 2000s. Through this scenario, Schad not only meditates on Benjamin’s ideas but tests them through speculative embodiment.
This is classic theory fiction: what happens when an idea walks around in the world, not just on the page?
3. Stylistic Hybridity and Disruption:
Schad uses a mix of:
fragments
footnotes
typographical play
shifting narrative perspectives
metafictional asides
This echoes the style of other theory-fiction writers who intentionally destabilize the reader’s position, refusing clarity or closure in favor of affective and philosophical resonance.
4. Fiction as Exegetical Device:
He’s deeply invested in literature as a space for critical reflection, but he doesn’t “apply” theory to literature—instead, he writes criticism as if it were fiction (or vice versa). This is a defining move in theory fiction: not “criticism on literature” but “literature as criticism.”
—
In context:
If Nick Land and the CCRU use theory fiction to explode capitalist futures and time loops, and Haraway uses it to rewire feminist epistemology, John Schad uses theory fiction to haunt literary criticism with theology, memory, and spectrality. His work is quieter, more melancholic, and more steeped in modernist residue, but no less radical.
—
In sum:
John Schad’s theory fiction isn’t cyberpunk or speculative in a sci-fi sense—it’s the ghost story of academic thought, the afterlife of theory written into narrative. His oeuvre shows us that theory fiction can be:
personal
historical
critical
and emotionally rich