David Malouf

Australian author David Malouf is well known for his works which deal with identity, language and nature in a colonial setting. Similarly, his Remembering Babylon (1993) discusses the vulnerability of identity within a British colonial setting in Australia. In the novel, the British colonials feel themselves lost in a foreign environment and they are constantly in a mental fight with the Aborigines. Malouf portrays the indigenous culture via Gemmy, a black white child who was raised by the Aborigines. In fact, Gemmy becomes a symbolic figure whose hybrid presence makes the white settlers question their identity and blurs the distinction between "Us" and "them", the colonial dichotomy. Standing for the unknown, Gemmy first awakens in the settlers the fear of the Aborigines and the return of the oppressed. In fact, Gemmy's presence violates the boundaries of identity categories, and even proves them wrong. To some critics, Gemmy embodies the new Australian identity. Accordingly, later in the novel, the white settlers find their own identity through Gemmy by finding a reconciliation with the landscape and with the colonized. Therefore, this article aims to examine the white settler's finding their identity in a colonial setting through a black white child as depicted in David Malouf's Remembering Babylon.

‘I read the Iliad every couple of years,’ David Malouf remarked in a 2010 interview (Kanowski 81). He considers the Iliad ‘the very first story we have,’ one which has ‘never been surpassed’ (Kanowski 80).
To those who identify Malouf as the preeminent practitioner of ‘a characteristic lyricism which blurs the boundaries between established literary genres’ (Nettelbeck, Provisional Maps i), his reverence for the West’s most famous war narrative may be surprising.

The relation of self and other is at the thematic heart of two of David Malouf's novels: An Imaginary Life and Remembering Babylon. 1 Characters demarcate the terms of this relation through their experiences: they endure alienation, suffer exile, or find themselves estranged from a linguistic community; they discover a sense of centredness, return to a home, or are absorbed into a common speech and the life of the community. Both of these texts have attracted specific critical comment, not all of it positive, regarding the ways they manifest and explore the self-other relation. Some reviewers and critics have questioned whether Malouf might not have passed up opportunities to represent viewpoints other than the consciousness of the narrator and the central characters, or to explore, in depth, authentic alternatives to hegemonic cultural paradigms. 2 Can a reader of An Imaginary Life step out from Ovid's consciousness, even momentarily, to take issue with his world of exile and its inhabitants? Can a reader of Remembering Babylon gain an insight into the lives of indigenous characters only glimpsed at the edges of the narrative? While there are sympathetic characters in both novels who experience and embody cultural exteriority, are readers able to gain significant insight into their experiences and worldviews?

Alexis Wright’s novel Plains of Promise leaves non-Aboriginal readers with a vast array of unanswered questions which, in fact, forces them in a position similar to one of the story’s central characters, Mary, who unsuccessfully tries to unravel the mysteries of her past in order to establish a sense of identity and place. The protective silence that envelops the core of her novel reflects Wright’s claim that “there are a lot of things that need to be said to the country and I found fiction was one way of saying them without exposing people from my traditional area to the kind of scrutiny that a conventional history would have risked” (Ravencroft 1998, my italics). However, if her text forecloses a complete understanding of Aboriginal culture to the uninitiated, where does this impossibility to gain full access lead the mainstream reader? It is this paper’s contention that Wright’s novel, in not facilitating a definitive reading of its crucial events to mainstream readership, propels the latter to exercises of self-scrutiny and self-criticism, propounding an evaluation of how Westerners see themselves and the surrounding world. To support the idea that Plains of Promise points this way for non-Aboriginal readership, it will also deal with the novel Remembering Babylon by one of Australia’s foremost non-indigenous writers, David Malouf, and try to establish to what extent both works may have intersecting political agendas against the background of Australia’s multiculturalist policies throughout the decade of the 1990s.

An Imaginary Life hailed as among David Malouf’s fully mature works, is considered a masterpiece in the history of Australian Literature. Based on the legendary exile of Ovid in Tomis, this novel very subtly captures his last days. It looks into the possible psychological and physical reverberations that an exile into the edges of civilization from a metropolitan life in Rome would create in the poet. The experiences of Ovid in this alien land can also be seen in relation to the post- colonial Australian experience. This paper looks at how Malouf has subtly dovetailed the Australian myth of exile – an integral element of the Australian identity – with the aboriginal cultural phenomenon of dreaming and dream time. I attempt to link the process of displacement and exile to the phenomenon of dreaming placing at the centre the colonising power of language which is an integral theme of the work. My paper has at its centre the idea that Australian literary tradition has as its backbone the subtle and real links between history and geography.

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 article examines David Malouf 's An Imaginary Life through the lens of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language. Confined for the rest of his life at Tomis, a distant and foreign outpost on the eastern border of the Roman Empire, the main character of Malouf's book, the Latin poet Ovid, endeavours to master a silent language. In doing so, Ovid overcomes the lack of correspondence between word and object. His efforts of learning a language made of 'silence', I argue, are an example of Benjamin's notion of Ursprache (primeval language), the primordial essence or 'the kinship' of language, a pivotal element of Benjamin's philosophy of language.

So natural is the habit of Australian self-analysis that its very quantity can easily become an occasion for further self-analysis. (Are Australians narcissistic?) There is no sign of a falling off. If anything, the number of books and articles seeking out, identifying or pondering the distinguishing features of Australian culture or the Australian people seems to be increasing. This essay discusses some recent examples, focusing on their underlying assumptions and motivations, and trying to put them into some kind of historical perspective.

The theme of loyalty pervades certain narratives. Loyalty gives characters emotional breadth and depth. It helps breathe textual meaning into them. Loyalty helps shape each character"s preference and individual faults; it also assists the connections, within textual space, certain characters share. The theme of loyalty, while sometimes not a central theme, is indispensable within narrative, giving text greater meaning. This essay uses Shakespeare"s Macbeth and Malouf"s Ransom to examine the meanings generated by the representation of loyalty. The essay has eight sections, which can be amalgamated into two broad parts. The first part concerns the concepts of meaning, characterisation, plot, and genre. The second includes charisma, power, focalisation, and finally, intertextuality. This essay argues: the theme of loyalty explicitly contributes to the narrative"s ability to offer plausible textual representation, by delivering greater emotive meaning.

kültür ve tarihi açısından en önemli değerlerden birisidir. Dede Korkut anlatılarında Türklerin en eski inanç ve yaşayış biçimlerinden eserin yazıya aktarıldığı yüzyıla kadar pek çok unsuru bugüne kadar araştırmacılar yaptıkları değerli çalışmalarla ortaya koymuşlardır. Bu bağlamda Dede Korkut anlatmaları üzerine yerli/yabancı pek çok araştırmacının çalıştığı en geniş literatüre sahip kültürel öğelerimizden birisidir. Ancak Dede Korkut Anlatmalarındaki aşk ve âşıklar üzerine günümüze kadar bir çalışma yapılmamıştır. Bu çalışmada Dede Korkut'ta aşkın nasıl yer aldığı, kahramanların aşklarını nasıl ifade ettikleri, aşk serüvenlerinde ne gibi zorluklarla karşılaştıkları gibi konular üzerinde durup metin merkezli bir inceleme yapılacaktır.

Edge-ness is a description of interrelationships between the physical and metaphysical, and between the animate and inanimate; between people, buildings, landscapes, concepts, and emotions. It is both a descriptor of a condition of physical containment and a meta-physical relationship between object and event, between physical attribute and phenomenological experience. The epistemology of the edge stems from the physical manifestation of intersection: the collision of two sides of a sword's blade at an edge. Edge-ness, therefore, also embeds within it the animate capacity of its intended action: its function and utility is to cut, maim, and kill. In a Deleuzian sense, the edge brings the embedded ritual and amenity of the blade into being, as an incorporeal event and climax of formal and cultural intersection. Edge-ness is thus a non-condition, a space of no space. It is neither the form nor the act: it is the transition between differing states of being. It is in this very transition that the most striking and powerful action of the edge is revealed. Its dynamism as a threshold between varying states makes manifest the embodiment of becoming, and thus denotes the edge as a site of flux and indeterminacy. The edge promotes not just the corning into being of the spatial territory of the in-between, but also the social physiology of addressing its immediate periphery.

In architecture, one of the primary means through which this transition is enacted and experienced is through the transition between states of privacy-from the secure and safe inner-sanctum of the domestic interior, to the vulnerability of public exposure in the urban void realm. The activation of this edge/threshold condition in contemporary architecture has been somewhat ignored, repressed by overarching compositional tactics that are more concerned with notions of formalism and generative cleverness. The edge is a circumstance of other overarching compositional concerns, rather than a site of choreographed design strategies in its own right. The chapter, therefore, seeks to consider what is at stake in this edge condition through the analysis of the vernacular architectural edge typology, the verandah. In particular, the chapter will chart the verandah’s application across two geographically and climatically contrasting locations in Australia-semi-tropical Brisbane (Queensland) and arid Adelaide (South Australia). The chapter speculates upon the physical and social characteristics of the verandah's anatomical elements and their physiology in order to reveal the verandah's forgotten role as a social device. In so doing, the chapter asserts that the gradual corrosion of the verandah's conceptual meaning and social application is marked by a simplified and reductive typological condition in order for it to be consumed by contemporary culture as a pictorialized ornamental feature. The chapter will propose that the true power of the verandah lies in its operative social capacity (its physiology) working in tandem with its elemental composition (its anatomy) as an architectural typology.

The folkloric power of place cannot be underestimated. This article examines the importance of David Malouf's childhood home in South Brisbane—12 Edmonstone Street—in shaping the imagination of one of Australia's most celebrated writers. It also addresses another very different kind of South Brisbane architectural site, hairdresser Stefan Ackerie's phallic Skyneedle. What will be considered is how Malouf's now long destroyed weatherboard home preserves the sheen of mythology, whereas Ackerie's all too visible Skyneedle short circuits the very possibility of being legendary because of its vertical omnipresence.

This paper discusses David Malouf's Blood Relations as a post-colonial text that writes back specifically to The Tempest - not as a narrowly parodic work but as one that attempts to problematize the power relationships set up on Shakespeare's mythical New World island and to question their legitimizing discourses.

Writing Colonisation: Violence, Landscape, and the Act of Naming in Modern Italian and Australian Literature offers a unique comparative analysis of modern Italian and Australian literature which has never been attempted at such length and depth. The book investigates the relation between language, violence, and colonialism through comparing and contrasting selected texts in the Italian and Australian tradition (Dino Buzzati, Ennio Flaiano, Guido Ceronetti, Patrick White, David Malouf, Randolph Stow, and Barbara Baynton) and submitting them to a close analysis. The literary analysis is complemented by a critical reflection on philosophical discussions of language in continental philosophy, especially in the works of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, and Martin Heidegger. The book provides innovative insights into colonialism, shedding new light and ideas on the works of the authors under analysis. The book argues for a novel reading of Italian and Australian texts and employs this reading to interrogate the ways in which language has been deployed to negotiate the colonial experience - especially in relation to the interface between language and landscape - and relates this experience to Western interpretation of religious texts (e.g., Genesis), which have often been used as a justification of colonial exploitation. The book is an excellent reference for courses on comparative literature and postcolonial literature.

Since the beginning of the 1990s scholars from disciplines as diverse as history, sociology, and film studies have been engaged in an attempt to theorize the role played by whiteness in the formation of dominant subjectivities. Specifically, these theorists have suggested that most white people experience their whiteness as intangible, universal, or transparent, and they find whiteness to be represented accordingly in literature, film, and other media. This essay explores these issues from a perspective previously unexamined in these theorizations, that of the postcolonial white settler. Ingram examines how settlers, by way of an analysis of the Australian novelist David Malouf's prizewinning work Remembering Babylon, attempt to define themselves as white subjects; that is, how they represent and construct whiteness in general and, importantly, a sense of their own whiteness in particular in literature.

David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993) chooses an imagery that evokes a Indigenous-inspired way of dealing with historical experience so as to “heal” the nation. Thus, his fictional attempt at the Reconciliation of mainstream and Indigenous Australia partakes in the official revision of contact history which recognises Indigenous claims upon a de-Aboriginalised past from which an Anglo-Celtic national identity has been constructed. Yet, Malouf’s revision of Australianness is as troubling as the official Reconciliation process proved to be. Malouf’s romantic adaptation of the life of the historic James Murrells—emulating the iconic figure of the white man gone native—replicates the tense 1990s debate on Reconciliation and Apology but takes it out of its political context. Unlike his real-life model, the cultural hybrid Gemmy Fairley is consistently infantilised and feminised at his return to white civilisation, which undercuts his possibilities for agency and takes the reader back to the very tensions in race and gender the narrative underplays but cannot overcome. Whereas Malouf’s subscription to a romantic literary project aims to bring the nation into contact with itself through a healing re-Dreaming of history, this produces a f(r)iction in which re-imagination and distortion of the past uncannily circle through each other, unsettling the political correctness the tale aims to forward. This postcolonial uncanny ambiguity, the result of competing histories and world views, is in tune with the open-endedness of Malouf’s novel: as a postmodern Australian explorer narrative, rather than offering a notion of resolution, its longing for a repaired or “full” Australian identity remains trapped in nostalgia.

The folkloric power of place cannot be underestimated. This article examines the importance of David Malouf's childhood home in South Brisbane—12 Edmonstone Street—in shaping the imagination of one of Australia's most celebrated writers. It also addresses another very different kind of South Brisbane architectural site, hairdresser Stefan Ackerie's phallic Skyneedle. What will be considered is how Malouf's now long destroyed weatherboard home preserves the sheen of mythology, whereas Ackerie's all too visible Skyneedle short circuits the very possibility of being legendary because of its vertical omnipresence.

I am indebted to more people than I can acknowledge properly here, for even the smallest favours have such a deep impact on the long hard slog that is a PhD. But there are two groups of people to whom I owe a larger debt than most. Firstly, to my colleagues, particularly Hendrick for his support on this long climb and Annika for commiserations and biscuits. The second is the women who have supported me along the way with advice, good conversation, moral support, and endless patience. Thank you for everything Caroline, Birgit, Sabine, Katharina, and Petra. For too many people, a PhD can be a lonely endeavour. In my case, this was not so, not least because of the loving support of my husband Johannes with his endless ability to look interested hearing words like 'Romantic' or 'model' for the thousandth time. I am grateful for so many acts of kindness and the genuine interest and respect which I have experienced in the academic community throughout this journey. I am thankful to Robert Clarke for his willingness to supervise my thesis from the other side of the world and to Christoph Bode for stepping in without hesitation when someone was needed closer. I will not forget the kindness of Lynn McCredden who invited me to her home when I, a complete stranger and rookie taking my first steps into academia, asked for advice. I am also grateful for the support and empathy of my colleagues Christin and Sandra when I came to them with news of death and then with news of birth. Finally, my thanks go to all those involved in the research group "Modell Romantik" which has supported my research, both financially and intellectually. It has been an honour to deep dive into Romanticism at the same place it was brought into life by the early Romantics of Jena. The threads which have woven themselves into literature across the globe have so become the same threads that tie together my different lives and different homes here in Germany and in Australia. "If you are to be interested in Australian literature, it is not because it is some peculiar and exotic place like Africa, it is because it is another version of Europe which will tell you something about Europe. The changes we have made and the variation of it that we offer will tell you about yourselves, and that's why you might be interested in what we're doing. "-Malouf 1990 Framing Romanticism Poetry is dense, compact, and in the case of Watson and Malouf, its voice is a deeply personal one. While the line between poetry and prose becomes ever more blurred, poetry retains a certain musicality, a form of communication with the reader which slips out from under the sign, making it a mode which lends itself to reflection on the relationship of the self to the world and to language itself. This is an unashamedly Romantic standpoint, but it is a fitting one, considering that these relationships form the central concern of this book. The way that Romantic irony is modelled in Malouf and Watson's texts, both thematically and in function, reflects a heightened and even postmodern awareness of language itself. In their 2016 anthology of Australian poetry, Langford, Beveridge, Johnson, and Musgrave write that there is a kind of " 'natural' This desire to move beyond a "black and white" frame of reference is part of Watson's irony: it is expressed in the broader ironic political drive in his work to open up a space that provides contingency and multiple views of urban Australia. Bringing Malouf 's and Watson's work together in this context is an attempt to work against an underlying racial bias in the characterisation of the sacred and the secular in Australia, in which white Australians are often constructed as brazenly and gloriously secular, full of disbelief, cynicism, and blasphemy. Black Aboriginal Australians are frequently depicted as possessing sacred values, truths, and visions, and as inhabiting sacred space […].

Ovid’s exile poetry declares that the poet has become a character from his Metamorphoses, while emphasizing the separation of Ovid’s book from its creator. This chapter argues that this factual/fictional polarity is also a central aspect in David Malouf’s novel An Imaginary Life, which records the poet’s struggle to survive and adjust in Tomis and ends with Ovid’s rebirth and transformation through the mediation of the Child, a wild boy who brings the metropolitan poet back to Nature. The very title of the novel juxtaposes the historical and the fictional dimension of Ovid’s exile; the novel begins programatically with a description of Tomis which turns out to be a mental dystopia, and as the novel progresses, myth breaks the boundaries of reality. Other boundaries are crossed too, as Malouf’s version of Ovid’s exile translates the Roman poet to the discourse and the topoi of postcolonial literature.

The folkloric power of place cannot be underestimated. This article examines the importance of David Malouf’s childhood home in South Brisbane—12 Edmonstone Street—in shaping the imagination of one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. It also addresses another very different kind of South Brisbane architectural site, hairdresser Stefan Ackerie’s phallic Skyneedle. What will be considered is how Malouf’s now long destroyed weatherboard home preserves the sheen of mythology, whereas Ackerie’s all too visible Skyneedle short circuits the very possibility of being legendary because of its vertical omnipresence.

Imaginary Exile" wanders through the experience of reading and life reflection and traces the narrative journey of the poet Ovid in David Malouf's influential novella An Imaginary Life, which serves as both anchor and disruption to an attachment to exile. The essay follows the forced corporeal movement of the author from virginal Australian bush, into inner urban landscapes and finally the abstraction of the Law. Exile is revealed as a utopic colonial fantasy in conflict with the author's intention to engage with contemporary realities. The writer's desire to hold onto Aristotelian form is confronted by the appearance of a memory that refuses to succumb to the writers demand for craft, and thus shreds her expectations of lineal narrative. This experience of a collision between two worlds, two laws, that occurred in 1998 in a Broome courtroom, challenges romantic attachments to a language prior to law or one that can escape 'the world' but also challenges the capacity of the writer to incorporate into text visceral experiences that conflict with received inheritances. The images and thought behind the memoir are heavily influenced by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and his notion of 'the contemporary,' but while the author finds solace in retreat, questions of how to engage with the contemporary world linger and are passed on.

This article examines David Malouf 's An Imaginary Life through the lens of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language. Confined for the rest of his life at Tomis, a distant and foreign outpost on the eastern border of the Roman Empire, the main character of Malouf's book, the Latin poet Ovid, endeavours to master a silent language. In doing so, Ovid overcomes the lack of correspondence between word and object. His efforts of learning a language made of 'silence', I argue, are an example of Benjamin's notion of Ursprache (primeval language), the primordial essence or 'the kinship' of language, a pivotal element of Benjamin's philosophy of language.

The folkloric power of place cannot be underestimated. This article examines the importance of David Malouf’s childhood home in South Brisbane—12 Edmonstone Street—in shaping the imagination of one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. It also addresses another very different kind of South Brisbane architectural site, hairdresser Stefan Ackerie’s phallic Skyneedle. What will be considered is how Malouf’s now long destroyed weatherboard home preserves the sheen of mythology, whereas Ackerie’s all too visible Skyneedle short circuits the very possibility of being legendary because of its vertical omnipresence.

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”.

Статья посвящена вопросу формирования экологического воспитания молодежи на занятиях по иностранному языку. Произведения австралийского писателя Дэвида Малуфа рассмотрены как учебный материал в целях развития экологической культуры, расширения словарного запаса и закрепления навыков межкультурной коммуникации. Рассказ «Плёс Джэко», опубликованный в сборнике «Материя снов» (2000), представлен как источник обсуждения такой актуальной проблемы, как уничтожение окружающей среды во имя голословного прогресса.

The article deals with the environmental education of youth in foreign language classes. Works published by the Australian writer David Malouf are considered as valuable teaching instruments for environmental culture development, vocabulary building and intercultural communication skill consolidation. The short story “Jacko’s Reach”, included in the collection “Dream Stuff” (2000) is presented as a source of discussion of a topical issue such as the destruction of the environment in the name of an alleged progress.

I am going to analyse the relationship between Priam and his body in David Malouf’s Ransom (2009) to show the symbolical implications behind Priam’s journey. The king’s aim is, in fact, to break free from the constraints of his kingly position to live simply as a man. The body is in many ways significant to this issue: it is the symbol of the human existence and it can be read as an allegory of concreteness, in opposition to the abstraction of the symbolic status of kingship and, consequently, to the epic gravity. Priam’s release from kingship is reflected by the progressive reclamation of his body, which goes from a symbol to an individual entity. In this view, Ransom tells Priam’s struggle to get free from the social expectations of his category, with the consequent affirmation of  his right to be a human. Body is thus a metonymy for authentic and individual life. In addition to that, it is also the symbol of the colloquial style, which frees Priam from the gravity of epic.
Yet, Malouf’s relationship with body is more complicated than that: in the end, when Priam has his body back, he tries to get rid of it to merge with the environment. In Malouf’s view, body itself is a category: for this reason, it is limiting and needs to be overcome.
In conclusion, Ransom uses the body to criticise the epic constraints, but it is well aware that body is a form of constraint too.

This essay is concerned with precisely the exchange between place and body, the movement from each to each in the writing of experiences which are part of the self. Focusing mainly David Malouf's poetry and his play, Blood Relations, we suggest that his evocations of place are often highly eroticised, and that connections between self and landscape are explored in terms of a metaphorical disintegration of the post-colonial body, whereby boundaries between the self and the landscape are interrupted and broken down.

David Malouf’s acclaimed novel 'Remembering Babylon' (1993) fictionalizes the first years of European settlement in Australia focusing on the interrelations of people and place. Aware of the risks of speaking of or for Aboriginal people, Malouf adopts the figure of Gemmy Fairley, a white man gone ‘native’, to explore obliquely the black/white interaction and provide an opening for questions of belonging and not-belonging. In an interview with Nikos Papastergiadis, however, Malouf affirms that 'Remembering Babylon' is not a book “about a purely Australian experience. It is about an experience of landscape”. Reading Malouf’s novel in an ecocritical frame, this paper intends to investigate the interconnectedness between land, sense of rootedness and (dis)possession during the colonizing process, as well as to see if and how the land can be recoverable through imagination, through stories able to trespass the anthropocentric nature/culture divide while fostering a new paradigm based on a “reciprocity of perspectives, in which man and the world mirror each other”.

David Malouf's Remembering Babylon (1993) can be seen as a bid for political correctness on the part of a writer who had never before registered the weight of Aboriginal experience in the scales of Australian cultural identity. Appearing as it did in the international context of the Year of Indigenous Peoples, but also, in Australia, at the time of the Mabo debate (when the Aborigines were given new legal visibility and presence in the eyes of the general public in this country), Malouf's new book may have seemed to strike the right kind of balance between eulogy (of the already much-celebrated pioneering spirit lying at the root of white Australian identity) and elegy (lamenting the loss of a darker side to the national psyche, hitherto suppressed in the very act of white selfdefinition). The structural centrality accorded in the novel to the character of Gemmy (a young Britisher rescued from shipwreck by some natives of Australia, who allow him to live in their midst for a...

I read the Iliad every couple of years,' David Malouf remarked in a 2010 interview (Kanowski 81). He considers the Iliad 'the very first story we have,' one which has 'never been surpassed' (Kanowski 80). To those who identify Malouf as the preeminent practitioner of 'a characteristic lyricism which blurs the boundaries between established literary genres' (Nettelbeck, Provisional Maps i), his reverence for the West's most famous war narrative may be surprising. To other readers, who regard Homer's classic as the standard for all European literature which follows it, his fascination is understandable. While recent decades have seen a lowered appreciation, in literary criticism, of texts which deal with such fundamental human concerns as adventure and conflict, the forays into this territory by a gifted writer such as Malouf have prompted some serious reconsideration. Some reviewers, faced with Ransom, have been given occasion to revisit the epic genre and to explore its relationship to the modern novel (see for example Mendelsohn). Ransom is not the first time that Malouf has explored war. As a novelist and poet of insight and delicacy, with remarkable observational powers, he is almost bound to address war in his considerations of human lives and histories, even when 'war material. .. is not [his] primary concern' (Malouf, 'Australian Literature and War' 266). He continues to write texts which interrogate human nature in order to foster understanding, rather than to pontificate on life's meaning. Indeed, Malouf's contribution to the literary consideration of war is unique; no other author has turned their attention so thoughtfully to the question of war in so many settings, or provided such rich material.

My paper aims to investigate how the Australian writer David Malouf’s Ransom (2009) deals with the roles imposed by epic and – consequently – by the Western tradition. The novel – an adaptation from Iliad 24 – can be fruitfully analysed by using the American sociologist and sociolinguistic Harvey Sack’s Membership Categorization Analysis. Sacks shows how social groups organise themselves around categories, which are based on Aristotelian syllogisms. In Malouf’s novel, both Priam and Achilles try to escape from the roles they are expected to play as epic characters – the best warrior and the king respectively – and therefore they question the social expectations upon them. In particular, they struggle to be humans rather than characters. This aim is accomplished by performing the actions expected by humans, namely feel emotions. In fact, both characters are not expected to be sensitive, since they are perceived by the others in the novel as mere actants that have to keep the story going.
In Sack’s view, Priam and Achilles belong to specific categories, therefore the other characters – which compose the social universe of the novel – expect them to perform the most suitable actions to their status. In particular, Priam has to be passive and let the others serve him, whereas Achilles has to be a cruel killer. However, none of them – albeit for different reasons –  is required to feel compassion. On the other hand, compassion belongs to the human category, which both characters still belong to. The novel thus shows the crisis that results from the category clash the two characters undergo and the consequent process they have to go through to affirm themselves as people. In this frame, Priam’s journey toward the Greek camp is a metaphor of the self-affirmation process that the king experiences; Achilles and Priam claim their right to be humans and reject the system of categories as such. In the wake of Homer, Malouf eliminates any social mediation and tries to get back to the equality of human condition.
Such a reading has powerful implications from the postcolonial point of view, since it overtly questions both Homer and the Aristotelian logic, namely the core of the Western culture and the fixed social roles it conveys. Australian born, British educated, Malouf devotes all his literary career to balance the different parts of his cultural identity, in search of a satisfactory synthesis. Therefore, his rejection of categories may also be applied to the Australian cultural context: in Malouf’s view, it is crucial to get over the superimposed concepts of “winner” and “loser” - or, rather,  “coloniser” and “colonised” - and reflect upon being humans. Ransom thus shows how inconsistent and limitng the Western way of thinking is and consequently tries to broaden the view, in the hope of a peaceful communion.