Transitivity and agency in Richard Jefferies’s rural essays: an ecostylistic analysis

IF 0.3 2区 文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS
Annalisa Federici
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This essay aims to provide an ecostylistic analysis of transitivity and agency in selected extracts from Richard Jefferies’s late nineteenth-century rural essays, which were collected in his so-called country books. Jefferies’s portrayal of the interconnection between humans and the natural environment has been variously described as “pantheistic”, a “pantheist revery”, or an “ecstatic communion”. The present study proposes to validate these claims by showing that Jefferies’s essays utilise patterns of transitivity to depict manifold relationships between human and non-human agents in placid landscape descriptions. These can be regarded as positive discourse praising the rural environment and humans’ entanglement with other animal and vegetable organisms. An in-depth scrutiny of the linguistic patterns of Jefferies’s texts, corroborated by the theoretical and methodological framework of (eco)stylistics and related disciplines (i.e. Systemic Functional Grammar), offers useful insights into the author’s ecosophy and holistic understanding of the human and non-human world. By conceptualising the various constitutive elements of the physical environment as active/agentive participants in particular types of processes, Jefferies gives special prominence to ecocentric, rather than anthropocentric positions.
理查德-杰弗里的乡村散文中的转义和代理:生态风格分析
本文旨在从理查德-杰弗里 19 世纪晚期的乡村散文(收录于他的所谓 "乡村书籍 "中)中选取部分节选,对其转义性和代理性进行生态风格分析。杰弗里对人类与自然环境之间相互联系的描绘被称为 "泛神论"、"泛神论的狂欢 "或 "狂喜的共鸣"。本研究通过证明杰弗里的文章在平和的景观描述中利用了反转模式来描绘人与非人之间的多重关系,从而验证了这些说法。这些可以被视为赞美乡村环境以及人类与其他动植物之间纠葛的积极话语。在(生态)文体学和相关学科(即系统功能语法)的理论和方法框架的支持下,对杰弗里文本的语言模式进行深入研究,为了解作者的生态哲学以及对人类和非人类世界的整体理解提供了有益的启示。杰弗里将物理环境的各种构成要素概念化为特定类型过程中的主动/积极参与者,从而特别突出了生态中心主义而非人类中心主义的立场。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.90
自引率
10.00%
发文量
19
期刊介绍: The aim of the Journal of Literary Semantics is to concentrate the endeavours of theoretical linguistics upon those texts traditionally classed as ‘literary’, in the belief that such texts are a central, not a peripheral, concern of linguistics. This journal, founded by Trevor Eaton in 1972 and edited by him for thirty years, has pioneered and encouraged research into the relations between linguistics and literature. It is widely read by theoretical and applied linguists, narratologists, poeticians, philosophers and psycholinguists. JLS publishes articles on all aspects of literary semantics. The ambit is inclusive rather than doctrinaire.
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