This essay focuses on a postmodern reading of An Imaginary Life by David Malouf. It argues that language is a central theme in the novel and that Ovid’s transformation corresponds to his changing attitude towards different languages. According to Karin Hansson, Ovid’s transformation is divided into three stages. First, he longs for Latin, then he acquires Getic and in the end he seeks the languages of nature. The essay shows that stage two, Ovid’s acquisition of Getic, induces the deconstruction of the traditional high culture-low culture dichotomy in the novel. Language is understood as a representative of culture, and when Ovid considers Getic equal to Latin, the distinction between high culture and low culture collapses. Stage three, Ovid’s relationship with the wild child and his acquisition of the instinctive languages of nature, leads to the deconstruction of the animal-human dichotomy. The facts that the wild child transcends animality by gaining language and that Ovid wants to overcome human languages and immerse himself in nature promote a non-binary and multifaceted understanding of the human-animal relationship. To confirm its argument, the essay draws on Jacques Derrida’s ideas of language as well as his notions of the animal-human relationship.

This thesis argues that Patrick White’s Voss, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life depict landscape in a manner that reveals the inadequacies of imperial epistemological discourses and the rationalist model of subjectivity which enables them. The study demonstrates that these novels all emphasise the instabilities inherent in imperial epistemology. White, Ondaatje and Malouf chart their protagonists’ inability to comprehend and document the landscapes they encounter, and the ways in which this failure calls into question their subjectivity and the epistemologies that underpin it. One of the principal contentions of the study, then, is that the novels under consideration deploy a postmodern aesthetic of the sublime to undermine colonial discourses. The first chapter of the thesis outlines the postcolonial and poststructural theory that informs the readings in the later chapters. Chapter Two analyses White’s representation of subjectivity, imperial discourse and the Outback in Voss. The third chapter examines Ondaatje’s depiction of the Sahara Desert in The English Patient, and focuses on his concern with the ways in which language and cartographic discourse influence the subject’s perception of the natural world. Chapter Four investigates the representation of landscape, language and subjectivity in Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. Finally, then, this study argues that literature’s unique ability to acknowledge alterity enables it to serve as an effective tool for critiquing colonial discourses.

This thesis explores the thematic desire to establish an ecological human bond with nature in four contemporary novels: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, and The Expedition to The Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenström. These authors share a concern with the influence that language has on human perception, and one of the most significant ways they attempt to connect with the natural world is through somehow escaping, or transcending, what they perceive to be the divisive tendencies of language. They all suggest that human perception is not steered entirely by a disembodied mind, which constructs reality through linguistic and cultural lenses, but is equally influenced by physical circumstances and embodied experiences. They explore the potential of corporeal reciprocity and empathy as that which enables understanding across cultural barriers, and a sense of ecologically intertwined kinship with nature. They all struggle to reconcile their awareness of the potential danger of relating to nature exclusively through language, with a desire to speak for the natural world in literature. I have examined whether they succeed in doing so, or whether they contradict their thematic suspicion of language with their literary medium. I have prioritised a close ecocritical reading of the novels and loosely situated the authors’ approach to nature and language within the broad theoretical frameworks of radical ecology, structuralism and poststructuralism. I suggest that these novels are best analysed in the context of an ecocritical mediation between poststructuralist conceptions of nature as inaccessible cultural construct, and the naïve conception of unmediated, pre-reflective interaction with the natural world. I draw especially on the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose insistence that perception is always both embodied and culturally mediated truly renders culture and nature irreducible, intertwined categories. By challenging historical dualisms like mind/body and culture/nature, the selected novels suggest a more fluid and discursive understanding of the perceived conflict between language and nature, whilst problematizing the perception of language as merely a cultural artefact. Moreover, they are examples of the kind of literature that has the potential to positively influence our human conception of nature, and adapt us better to our ecological context on a planet struggling for survival.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / This study investigates the poetic foundation of David Malouf’s poetry and prose published from 1960 to 1982. Its purpose is to extend reading strategies so that the nature of his poetic and its formative influence are more fully appreciated. Its thesis is that Malouf explores and tests with increasing confidence and daring a poetic imagination that he believes must meet the demands of the times. Malouf’s work is placed in relation to Wallace Stevens’ belief that the poetic imagination should “push back against the pressure of reality”, a view discussed by Seamus Heaney in “The Redress of Poetry”. The surprise of the poetic as “unpredicted aesthetic value” (García-Berrio, 1989) is significant to his purposes and techniques, as it creates idea-images and feeling-values (Jung, 1921) that bring together apparently opposite ways of knowing the world. In seeking to represent the meeting of inner and outer perceptions, Malouf’s work shows the influence not only of Stevens but also Rilke and contemporary American poetry of “deep image”. The Australian context of Malouf’s work is considered in relation to Judith Wright’s essay “The Writer and the Crisis” and the poetry of Malouf’s contemporaries. Details of the manuscript development of his first four novels show Malouf’s steps towards a clearer representation of his holistic, post-romantic vision. His correspondence with the poet Judith Rodriguez provides useful insights into his purposes. Theories and research about brain functions, the nature of intelligence and learning provide an important international context in the 1960s and 1970s, given Malouf’s interest in how meaning forms from perception and experience. Jean Piaget’s view of intelligence and David Kolb’s theory of experiential learning (1984) offer frameworks for reading Malouf that have not yet been considered. The thesis offers a model of poetic learning that highlights the interplay of dialectically opposed ways of forming meaning and points to the importance for Malouf of holding diverse states of mind together through the poetic imaginary.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / This study investigates the poetic foundation of David Malouf’s poetry and prose published from 1960 to 1982. Its purpose is to extend reading strategies so that the nature of his poetic and its formative influence are more fully appreciated. Its thesis is that Malouf explores and tests with increasing confidence and daring a poetic imagination that he believes must meet the demands of the times. Malouf’s work is placed in relation to Wallace Stevens’ belief that the poetic imagination should “push back against the pressure of reality”, a view discussed by Seamus Heaney in “The Redress of Poetry”. The surprise of the poetic as “unpredicted aesthetic value” (García-Berrio, 1989) is significant to his purposes and techniques, as it creates idea-images and feeling-values (Jung, 1921) that bring together apparently opposite ways of knowing the world. In seeking to represent the meeting of inner and outer perceptions, Malouf’s work shows the influence not only of Stevens but also Rilke and contemporary American poetry of “deep image”. The Australian context of Malouf’s work is considered in relation to Judith Wright’s essay “The Writer and the Crisis” and the poetry of Malouf’s contemporaries. Details of the manuscript development of his first four novels show Malouf’s steps towards a clearer representation of his holistic, post-romantic vision. His correspondence with the poet Judith Rodriguez provides useful insights into his purposes. Theories and research about brain functions, the nature of intelligence and learning provide an important international context in the 1960s and 1970s, given Malouf’s interest in how meaning forms from perception and experience. Jean Piaget’s view of intelligence and David Kolb’s theory of experiential learning (1984) offer frameworks for reading Malouf that have not yet been considered. The thesis offers a model of poetic learning that highlights the interplay of dialectically opposed ways of forming meaning and points to the importance for Malouf of holding diverse states of mind together through the poetic imaginary.

With its focus on the relationship between dreamscape and death, this study examines the possibility of indirectly experiencing – through writing and dreaming – that which cannot be directly experienced, namely death. In considering this possibility, the thesis engages at length with Maurice Blanchot's argument that death, being irrevocably absent and therefore unknowable, is not open to presentation or representation. After explicating certain of this thinker's theories on the ambiguous nature of literary and oneiric representation, and on the forfeiture of subjective agency that occurs in the moments of writing and dreaming, the study turns to an examination of the manner in which such issues are dealt with in selected dreamscapes. With reference to David Malouf's An Imaginary Life, Alan Warner's These Demented Lands, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and Richard Linklater's Waking Life, the thesis explores the literary and cinematic representation of human attempts to define, resist, or control death through dreaming and writing about it. Ultimately, the study concludes that such attempts are necessarily inconclusive, and that it is only ever possible to represent death as a (mis)representation.