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Homo ferus: the unification of the human and the environmental in David Malouf's An imaginary life
Abstract
This essay presents a postcolonial, ecocritical reading of Australian author David Malouf's celebrated novel, An imaginary life (1978). By now an important name in contemporary postcolonial literature, Malouf has yet to be discussed as an author who attempts to explode both colonial and human-centred myths and tropes in a manner that promotes a linguistically sensitive, body- and nature-centred vision. As this essay will argue, Malouf's writing, in its critique of Enlightenment values that have led to the racial classification of humans and modernity's dismissal of the importance of the environment, advances a unique postcolonial and ecological aesthetic. One way in which An imaginary life interrogates Enlightenment values is through its interest in the figure of the “feral child”, a “discovery” or construction of the Enlightenment era itself. The term “feral child” derives from Linnaeus's category “Homo ferus”, appearing in the tenth edition of his Systema naturae (The system of nature). Classified alongside Linnaeus's racial human categories (like Homo Afer and Homo Europaeus), Homo ferus emerges concurrently with the colonial obsession with racial “otherness”. For Malouf, however, the feral human eludes the categorisation of taxonomy specifically and language in general: blurring the “human” and “nature”, it undermines the scientific classification of humankind, and without language, it embodies the possibility of human being-in-nature beyond the influence of symbolic enculturation. In An imaginary life, the wordless immersion of the feral child in the environment allegorises the novel's intention – to produce another form of language, a poetic, allusive language transcending classification and chronology, and enacting the unification of the “human” and the “natural”.
... Ferus referia-se às crianças "selvagens" que cresciam com pouco contacto humano ou que eram criadas no meio dos animais, monstrosus referia-se às pessoas com diversidade corporal, desde pessoas anãs, a pessoas gigantes, passando pelas alterações artificiais provocadas, por exemplo, nas cinturas da jovens europeias ou nos crânios de crianças chinesas ou canadianas. Os tipos ferus e monstrosus foram necessários para manter imaculada a imagem da raça europeia perfeita, considerada superior, uma vez que nesta geografia também se poderiam encontrar seres "imperfeitos", como foi o caso de Peter de Hanover, encontrado durante a infância numa floresta da Alemanha e que teve dificuldades para aprender a falar (Grogan, 2014). Estas classificações eram baseadas não apenas em características físicas e geográficas, mas também morais (FERREIRA, 2019). ...
No âmbito desportivo, mulheres cisgénero com hiperandrogenia e pessoas trans podem experimentar entraves à competição devido à perceção de que a sua composição fisiológica e anatómica interfira no fair play. Com um percurso que se inicia com a introdução dos testes de doping, este artigo apresenta uma proposta epistemológica ancorada no pós-humanismo na crítica à máxima do fair play aplicada à regulação da hiperandrogenia e transgenderismo no desporto. O pós-humanismo servirá como uma ferramenta de upgrade ao método de pensamento dualista, não apenas em termos de sexo/género, mas também em termos de humano/não-humano, biologia/tecnologia, branco/negro, fair play/batota. O facto de as mulheres com hiperandrogenia afetadas pelas regras de verificação de sexo serem, a partir dos anos 2000, oriundas de países do Sul Global, orienta o artigo para uma abordagem intersecional, através da qual é possível observar camadas de opressão sobre corpos ainda intocados pela medicina ocidentalizada.
Drawing on Bernd Mahr’s model theory, this volume offers a new theory of Romanticism in contemporary (sub)urban Australia. Taking a transcultural approach, it brings together two writers: David Malouf and Indigenous poet Samuel Wagan Watson. In this first book dedicated to these authors’ poetic oeuvre, comprehensive readings reveal an ironic dialectic underpinning how they write from within a disjunct of culture and environment following colonisation. Irony enables an evocation of place, even as it acknowledges the impossibility of ever achieving a unified sense of place in Australia’s palimpsestic layers of histories and myths. The theoretical framing of Romanticism in this book effectively rehabilitates Romanticism as a productive paradigm in contemporary Australian poetry.
This study situates Malouf within the field of contemporary international and postcolonial writing, but without losing sight of the author's affiliation with Australian contexts. It presents an original reading of Malouf, finding the unity of his work in the continuity of his ethical concerns: for Malouf, human lives find their value in transformations, specifically in instances of self-overcoming that encounters with difference or otherness provoke. However, the book is fully aware of, and informed by, the quite ample body of criticism on Malouf, and thus provides readers with a broad-based understanding of how his works have been received and assessed. It is an effective companion volume for studies in postcolonial or Australian literature.
This article is most concerned with analysing the role of the other in Malouf’s fiction. It briefly considers Malouf’s relationship with history and postcoloniality before engaging in a close reading focused on Malouf’s personal grammar and figurative patterns. The argument demonstrates that Malouf’s style orients itself toward transformation: the grammar is active, movement-oriented, and the figures notably hybrid or syncretic. Text-making thus reveals itself as a principal path of approach to the other. Identification, as portrayed in psychoanalytic theory, presents itself as another path, especially in relation to imagination and dreams. The essay recognizes that a full apprehension of the other is not perhaps possible, although moments of contact and revitalizing exchange clearly are. Brief examination of the relation between otherness and the broader social world follows, giving attention to questions of gender. Extending beyond its exclusive consideration of An Imaginary Life, the essay concludes by acknowledging that Malouf explores his sense of the other most illuminatingly in relation to I-and-you.
The degrading environment of the planet is something that touches everyone. This book offers an introductory overview of literary and cultural criticism that concerns environmental crisis in some form. Both as a way of reading texts and as a theoretical approach to culture more generally, 'ecocriticism' is a varied and fast-changing set of practices which challenges inherited thinking and practice in the reading of literature and culture. This introduction defines what ecocriticism is, its methods, arguments and concepts, and will enable students to look at texts in a wholly new way. Boxed sections explain key critical terms and contemporary debates in the field with 'hands-on' examples and comparisons.
