Volume 8, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Ecostylistics: Texts, methodologies and approaches; Guest Editor: Daniela Francesca Virdis

Fundamentally, meaning is organized along two dimensions, similarity and contiguity, corresponding to two areas of the brain primarily responsible for language processing, Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area, respectively. Modern culture has tended to overemphasize the similarity dimension through money/commodification in capitalism, and mathematics in science, with disastrous ecological consequences. Ecostylistics can celebrate and analyze themes and linguistic patterns of poetry and novels which challenge this overemphasis. Five such themes are suggested in this article. To counter overemphasis on similarity (1) individuation. To celebrate Broca’s area’s contiguity dimension (2) dynamic process, and (3) interrelatedness and communication with the natural world. However, concentration on local contiguities of time, manifest in the contemporary English-speaking novel, distracts from the global contiguities of (4) long-term ecological change. (5) The two dimensions are also manifest in metaphor, which challenges conventional similarity-based classification, and narrative, which expands the contiguity dimension beyond the clause. These themes are illustrated by poetic examples from Wordsworth and Edward Thomas, and detailed analysis of the following texts: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” and “Nature is a Heraclitean Fire”; Edward Thomas’s “The Word”, Alice Oswald’s “Sonnet” and “Birdsong for Two Voices”, and, returning to a text whose analysis by Michael Halliday was seminal for Stylistics, William Golding’s The Inheritors . Transitivity analysis within the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar is used throughout, and connections are made with quantum physics, Daoism, and other process philosophies.

The Issa Valley , a novel by the renowned Polish émigré poet and writer Czesław Miłosz, is a partly autobiographical rendition of Miłosz’s early years spent on his family estate at Szetejnie in Lithuania. The omniscient narrator presents the early years and adolescence of a Polish gentry boy, Thomas Dilbin; the second, equally important protagonist of the novel is the eponymous Issa Valley. The book is an homage paid to the beauty of Lithuanian nature and to the world of childhood memories; as such, it invites an attempt at an ecostylistic interpretation, which is the main aim of this study. The methodology applied to analyze its English translation partly follows Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short’s taxonomy of linguistic aspects relevant when studying fiction, such as context, lexicon, syntax, and figuration. Furthermore, this ecostylistic analysis focuses on figuration and its imagistic potential in picturing the Issa landscape. Master tropes (simile, metaphor, synecdoche, irony, and antithesis) work at three textual levels: micro- , macro- , and megatropical . This scrutiny proves that the novel is an instance of what I call existential ecology , with antithesis as a dominant textual backbone; it also demonstrates that figuration reflects an intensely corporeal experience of nature by the young Thomas. The main contribution of this article to Miłosz’s scholarship is that it offers an ecostylistic reading of The Issa Valley , which has not been applied to the novel so far, specifically from lexical, grammatical, and tropological perspectives.

This article explores the posts with ecological concerns published by the community organization speakGreen on its website and Facebook page. The analysis falls within the aims and scope of ecostylistics, and is undertaken by applying Lesley Jeffries’ stylistic model of opposition. The main research purpose of this article is to identify the stylistic strategies promoting beneficial stories and those controverting destructive stories, in Arran Stibbe’s terminology. A broader research purpose is to assess whether the stylistic model of opposition can fruitfully be utilized to examine ecologically-oriented short texts and the non-literary text type of the speakGreen post. This ecostylistic study firstly demonstrates that unconventional opposites are more effective than conventional opposites in conveying beneficial stories, since their unexpected contrasts surprise the speakGreen website and Facebook users. Secondly, the study proves that two structural triggers of opposition, namely negation and especially parallel structure, are the most frequent in the sample of posts under investigation, due to the stylistic and discursive characteristics of the speakGreen post text type. The sample was also found to feature: (1) The visual trigger of green and red color-coding, which indicates contrast between beneficial stories and destructive stories; (2) Such stylistic devices as foregrounded end-focus and phonological parallelism. All these stylistic traits contribute to making the posts articulate texts relaying refined ecological messages in very few words.

In a recent interview, writer and activist Arundhati Roy has proposed the definition of ‘Delhi as a novel’ to pinpoint the cultural variety, ramification, and dynamism of the Indian capital city. Rather than being a mere literary embellishment, this type of conceptualization reveals the author’s attitude towards the environment, in its geographical, human, and non-human shapes, as important segments and participants of the wide biosphere. In Roy’s prose, in fact, the linguistic depiction of places as diverse as the teeming streets of Delhi, the flourishing fields of Kerala, and the impervious valleys of Kashmir not only supports the creation of meaning in the narrative, but also permits foreground-loaded questions of identity and belonging, particularly with regard to liminal subjects such as women, hijras (i.e. transgender persons) and migrants. Adopting the perspective of ecostylistics, an interdisciplinary domain that borrows and integrates ideas, frameworks, and methods from stylistics and ecocriticism, this article intends to investigate (1) some of the linguistic features of Roy’s postcolonial narratives, focusing on the strategic ‘architecture’ of the text-worlds that center around the environment, and (2) the power of the language to index social questions of precarity. The analysis considers extracts from Roy’s fictional and non-fictional texts, in particular her novels The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , and applies various critical tools. The main findings of the investigation exhibit the author’s ecological view and political beliefs that emerge in devices like point of view, figurative language, and defamiliarization, and that trigger a broader view of the environment, one in which the relation between the human and the non-human is complementary rather than competitive.

In the ancient world, cities served as physical and conceptual containers to separate a controlled, orderly area from the chaos outside. The depictions of cities in the Hebrew Bible largely underwrite this paradigm. Third Isaiah’s vision of Jerusalem, however, imagines a space that challenges these engrained ideas of the urban. Conducting a cognitive ecostylistic analysis and drawing on insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Text World Theory, this article examines the green city as imagined by Third Isaiah (Isaiah 56–66). Throughout the vision, the prophet creates a new (text-) world defined by urban and natural world-builders, a blend that unites seemingly paradoxical elements. The utopian character of future Jerusalem is downplayed by its grounding in the real world (both the discourse-world and its near-equivalent, the empty text-world in which the prophecy is uttered). Third Isaiah calls for a view of city space that draws on the known, dissolving existing dichotomies and categories. As such, it invites modern readers to rethink not only the biblical Jerusalem but also urban space and its relationship to nature more generally.

The present paper explores descriptions of natural landscapes excerpted from two travel books, namely, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas , by Paul Theroux, and Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus , by Robert D. Kaplan. The paper aims at analyzing how certain linguistic choices in a given stretch of text conspire to construe the ambience of descriptive passages of natural landscapes in travel writing. This will be carried out by combining insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Frame Semantics (FS). I will be focusing on the ambience of the natural depictions, that is, the sense of the natural world evoked in the reader’s mind by the language of the text. This will be dealt with by examining the lexical choices made by both authors, paying special attention to the adjectives. The excerpts under investigation have been selected since the descriptive language in them evokes frames and conceptual domains, which, in turn, yield a series of metaphors. These metaphors summarize the tone of the travel books, that is, the authorial texture and, especially, the ideological stance of the authors. Paul Theroux displays a more empathetic approach to the surrounding nature and its people, whereas Robert D. Kaplan adopts a more distant, analytical stance.

Diane Seuss’s ekphrastic poetry collection Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl is a celebration of life and death, imagination and reality, stillness and movement. This paper focuses on the first poem of the collection to investigate the relationship between the poetic persona and the landscape surrounding her. I employ central principles of cognitive linguistics as applied in the field of stylistics to discuss the manifestation of her mind style and examine how she constructs and situates herself in the environment. Drawing on Langacker’s notion of construal , I analyze the perspective and the degree of specificity of the descriptions. I also trace the extensive use of the container image schema that underlies the semantics of the poem. The paper demonstrates that despite her assumed idyllic existence, the poetic voice’s ornate descriptions of nature conceal a sense of uneasiness and confinement and the highly granular lexical choices and figurative expressions reveal her anthropocentric view of the environment. This gives rise to her feelings of alienation while the presence of the container image schema reinforces her sense of confinement. From an ecostylistic perspective, the analysis demonstrates how an anthropocentric view may manifest itself linguistically, highlighting textual features of anthropocentric narratives.