Cutting Up Books: A Writing Method In Critical Thinking

An experimental exploration of writing, creativity, and knowledge-making through the radical act of cutting up books. 

Over six months, Ania Malinowska dismantled over four hundred books, reframing their content into 111 poetic epigrams and combining conscious methodical experimentation with the spontaneity of automatic writing. Blending theory, practice, and art, her new book champions this practice of “textrapolation,” framing it as a method of critical composition that uses destruction as a form of discovery. At once a manifesto and a manual, Cutting Up Books addresses the crisis of creativity in academic and cultural practices while responding to contemporary challenges, including crises in education and perceived threats posed by large language models. 

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. 

Ania Malinowska is a cultural theorist, experimental writer, and professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland.