![]() ![]() Jeanette Winterson’s infamous use of intertextuality and self-quotation, often dismissed as arrogance, compels her readers to locate her works within an interconnected cycle. ![]() By looking back at Murnane’s predecessors, we can better see how the most inward of writers imagines the landscape of his fiction. ![]() While his work may respond to Derridian readings, it comes alive when compared to Brontë’s paracosmic imagination, Proust’s theory of art, and the circular regeneration of James’ late writing. However, when Murnane’s work is read against some of his favourite author’s, Emily Brontë, Marcel Proust and Henry James, the fiction speaks of a different methodology. His recent fiction, with its ever spiralling self-referential nature, may only encourage this response. Critical response to Murnane’s earlier fiction (before his break) often positioned him within the tradition of post-modern literary theory, particularly deconstructionist accounts of language. After ‘giving up’ publishing in 1995, he began again with the novel Barley Patch in 2009, and later came to write a work called A History of Books (2012), followed by his latest novel A Million Windows (2014). Gerald Murnane has been, for some forty years, trying to describe his life through fiction. Honours thesis completed at the University of Melbourne in 2015. Rather than asking if the text, the author, and/or the protagonist are socially committed enough or experimental enough or feminist enough for us to care, we should be asking what this text reveals about the process of human subjectivity in general, marginalized subjectivity in particular, and how we can create more ethical relationships between self and other. By combining Richard Rorty’s vision of a “literary culture” with Kelly Oliver’s theory of “witnessing,” I argue that we’ve been asking the wrong questions of this text. In an effort to analyze why Bombal’s novel and the protagonist’s performance have been problematic for critics, I turn from literary theory to philosophy. However, the text has generated a significant body of notably unsympathetic-and even censorious-criticism from scholars. ![]() One would expect that the protagonist’s increasing alienation throughout the novel and her ultimate surrender to an identity that she loathes would generate a compassionate response from readers. La última niebla (1935) by María Luisa Bombal presents a female protagonist traumatized by the restrictive gender norms of 1930s Argentina. ![]()
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