Explores writing as experiment and destruction as discovery. Blending theory, art, and practice, it introduces textrapolation: a cut-up method that reimagines creativity, authorship, and knowledge-making in the age of artificial unintelligence. Encourages intellectual play, intuition, and embodied experimentation to reanimate writing and thought.
Intellect is pleased to share that Cutting Up Books: A Writing Method In Critical Thinking, by Ania Malinowska, is now available in paperback and e-book.
Can breaking and reassembling language unlock new pathways for understanding, research, and creative practice? Over a six-month period, Ania Malinowska dismantled more than 400 books, reframing their contents into 111 poetic epigrams. This process combines sustained, methodical experimentation with the openness and contingency of automatic writing. In doing so, Cutting Up Books addresses a wider crisis of creativity within contemporary academic and cultural practice, while engaging directly with current challenges in education and the perceived threat posed by large language models.
The result is both manifesto and manual. Cutting Up Books invites readers to become active participants. It argues for intellectual play, intuition, and embodied experimentation as serious scholarly tools, capable of reanimating writing, research, and thought. Moving between academic reflection, poetic fragments, and visual-textual composition, Malinowska operates across the scholarly and the personal, the analog and the algorithmic.
The introduction and an interview with the author, Ania Malinowska, are both available to read on our website.
Foreword
IntroductionChapter 1: Experimentation Turns
Chapter 2: Templates of CreativityChapter 3: TextrapolationsChapter 4: Invitation to Cannibalize
Chapter 5: Writing in Combinations
Chapter 6: Cut Up Your Books!
Conclusion
Bibliography