Five themes for ecostylistics

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