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Cutting Up Books - A Writing Method In Critical Thinking is an experimental exploration of writing, creativity, and knowledge-making through the radical act of cutting up books. Blending theory, practice, and art, it proposes textrapolation: a method of critical composition that uses destruction as a form of discovery.
Drawing on traditions of the cut-up, collage, and automatic writing, the book turns the materiality of text into a thinking tool, showing how breaking and reassembling language can generate new modes of understanding.
Thematically, it connects literary experimentation with philosophy, media theory, and the crisis of creativity in the age of artificial intelligence. It reconsiders authorship, education, and the function of books in a culture increasingly defined by templates, automation, and cognitive fatigue. Combining academic reflection with poetic fragments and visual-textual compositions to move between the scholarly and the personal, the analog and the algorithmic.
Over six months, Ania Malinowska dismantled over 400 books, reframing their content into 111 poetic epigrams and combining conscious methodical experimentation with the spontaneity of automatic writing. Cutting Up Books addresses the crisis of creativity in contemporary academic and cultural practices while responding to
contemporary challenges, including the crises in education and the perceived threat posed by large
language models.
The result is both a manifesto and a manual: a hybrid text that invites readers to become practitioners. It encourages intellectual play, intuition, and embodied experimentation as ways of reanimating writing and thought. At once critical and performative, the book demonstrates how cutting up can be a method of thinking, creating, and living differently.
'This highly original and visually appealing aesthetic treat presents an experimental method called “textrapolation”—a collection of text collages that function as both poetry and scholarly references.'
— Margret Grebowicz, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Ania Malinowska is a cultural theorist, experimental writer, and associate professor at the Arctic University of Norway, formerly at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. Her work explores the intersections of technology, affect, and creative practice.
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
01 Experimentation turns
02 Templates of creativity
03 Textrapolations
04 Invitation to cannibalize
05 Writing in combinations
06 Cut up your books!
Conclusion
Bibliography