Cirrus@Austlit

'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.' 

(Publication abstract)