Cirrus@Austlit

'In this essay I take, as my departure point, Anthony Macris’ 2012 novel Great Western Highway: a love story. My specific focus is the presence of technology in the novel, and the way technology is shown to shape relations between individuals and between the individual and the world. Rather than adopt a strictly critical mode of writing, I have chosen to write this essay by oscillating between critical and creative prose, and drawing on a mixture of academic research, personal experience and anecdote. Such a mode is invited by Macris’ novel, which itself occupies the liminal space between fictional and critical writing. Furthermore, the fictocritical format of this essay allows me to deliberately confuse and conflate my own images with those from Macris’ novel. I enact this confusion in the hope that my essay becomes a contribution to Macris’ textual hall of mirrors, or what he more technically labels the ‘Generative mise en abyme’ (Macris 2008: 2).' (Publication summary)