Presented by Lucy Neave as part of the SLLL Literary Studies Seminar Series

Eva Hornung’s award-winning novel Dogboy (2009) portrays a child raised by dogs in a large Russian city. Having become intimate with a dog pack, Dogboy’s Romochka, only barely participates in the “human” life of the city. While Romochka evinces human qualities, his bestial appearance results in the intervention of authorities. By reading Dogboy via Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), which draws on Ancient Greek terms for life, Romochka’s existence could be termed zoēic, or living in the simple way of all creatures. For Agamben, Western politics is founded on a binary that pairs ‘bare life/political existence, zoē/bios, exclusion/inclusion’, meaning the ascription to certain subjects of a ‘bare life’ status that results in exclusion from political engagement. In Hornung’s novel, Romochka’s zoēic or creaturely life is evoked partly through the association of Romochka with seasonal time and subsistence-level existence.

This paper looks at the novel’s two interlinked storylines, the first of which concerns Romochka’s attempted rescue, separation of him from the dog pack and attempt to re-socialise him and the second of which touches on archetypal ‘wild-child’ narratives. In doing so, it asks questions about time and narrative in contemporary novels which evoke a creaturely existence through the depiction of a form of biological, experienced time.

Lucy Neave is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the Australian National University. She is the author of Who We Were (Text Publishing, 2013) and has published scholarship on writers’ practices, revision, literary networks and on the representation of animals in contemporary Australian fiction by women. She is the recipient of a second book fellowship from Varuna: The National Writers’ House and an Australia Council for the Arts grant.

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