Inside the house of fiction: The creative-critical possibility of Gerald Murnane’s A Million Windows
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: To grapple with the meaning of creative-critical writing today, it is necessary to begin from within literature. Too often, literary critics take up a disinterested position outside the text, which foregoes the ways in which the critic is always entangled with the text’s meanings. Through a reading of Gerald Murnane’s A Million Windows (2014), I propose a model for how a critic might read from within a literary text. I demonstrate how Murnane’s fiction – through the use of estrangement – entangles the reader-critic into performing acts of extension, rather than explication. With Murnane’s fiction, a critic must embrace – extend themselves into – a fictional landscape where “it [is] impossible to accept that the last page of a book of fiction was any sort of boundary or limit” (Murnane, 2014, p. 20). Such extended reading opens new possibilities for criticism’s form.
Source: TEXT
DOI: 10.52086/001c.124126
Author: Reuben Mackey
Institution: Monash University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4405122792