Given that thirty-nine years have elapsed since the publication of Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, it’s disappointing to find her critique still relevant to any number of films being produced today. But what struck me on a recent re-reading of the piece was not the its application to film but rather to a whole new medium that’s opened up in the intervening decades: the internet.

Flicking through an old issue of Overland (edition 182) I came across an essay by Malcolm Knox entitled ‘Pushing Against the Real World: The Case for “Original” Australian Fiction’. It sparked my interest – I was grappling with similar ideas at the time – especially by mentioning a paper delivered by Mark Davis in 2005 in which he argued that the ‘Australian literary novel’ is suffering a slow and inevitable demise.