This course on Ecolinguistics provides a theoretical framework and practical tools for revealing how the dominant discourses of our unsustainable industrial civilization promote ecologically destructive behaviour. Students will analyse a wide range of texts from advertisements, lifestyle magazines and economics textbooks to literary texts. In each case, the question is whether the stories that underlie texts allow us to identify consumerist and destructive discourses, or encourage us to care about people and the ecosystems that life depends on. Part of the module will therefore consider the theoretical and practical issues in order to conduct what J. R. Martin defines as Positive Discourse Analysis within ecolinguistics
The course is based on Arran Stibbe’s Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By, Routledge, 2021) in order to reveal the stories that support unequal and unsustainable societies and search for inspirational forms of language that can help rebuild a more ecological world. It describes eight types of ‘stories we live by’: ideologies, framings, metaphors, evaluations, identities, convictions, erasure and salience. These stories are cognitive, as they belong to people’s mind, but they also manifest themselves in distinctive patterns of language. The aim of ecolinguistics is to analyse these patterns, reveal the ‘stories we live by’, and open them to a critical investigation.