The Poetics of Wolves: Mapping a Metaphor in World Literature

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DECEMBER 16, 2016 BY MEDIEVALISTS.NET

The Poetics of Wolves: Mapping a Metaphor in World Literature

By Peter Arnds

Paper given at the conference Making Sense of the Animal – Human Bond and Relationship(s), at Mansfield College, Oxford (2016)

http://www.medievalists.net/2016/12/poetics-wolves-mapping-metaphor...

Photo by alexandre alacchi / Flickr

Abstract: The biopolitical tactic of reducing humans to the level of animals is a global phenomenon, the language of racism teeming with animal metaphors, especially animals considered unclean and parasitic – wolves, dogs, rats, pigs, and lice. In lycanthropy, the transformation of a human into a wolf, myth and the politics of persecution come together. I have shown this in my most recent monograph entitled Lycanthropy in German Literature(Palgrave Macmillan 2015) where I argue that as a symbol of sovereignty and abjection the human wolf of the Germanic Middle Ages is iconic to the representation of biopolitics in the German cultural imagination from the early modern age to the post-war literary scene.

In my paper I want to trace the ways in which the metaphor of the wolf transforms over time and cultural space, how it epitomizes different and shifting cultural anxieties, trauma, but also hope. This mapping will highlight some of the key moments of lycanthropy in twentieth-century world literature, and ask if we can detect universal aesthetic responses to political violence, or whether different cultures and their traumatic pasts produce different aesthetics. What does the tracking of these metaphors and their etymological and linguistic development reveal about cultures over time and space?

While in Western, Christian societies the wolf is considered demonic and a pest due to his migratory trespassing onto the land of sedentary people, in pre-Christian cultures (ancient Rome) and some Eastern cultures, like Mongolia, the wolf is revered. Literature, for example, Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem or David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life can elucidate these differences. Is there a universal human metaphorical and myth-steeped language around the world that has the tendency to reduce some individuals to the level of the non-human, or are there cultural exceptions among peoples that are less technologically developed and more nomadic, and in closer touch with their mythical beginnings?

Click here to read this article from Inter-disciplinary.net