Abstract
This article is an overview of how language communicates and construes humanity’s relationship to the environment in different cultural contexts. With reference to Moth Smoke (2012), Trespassing (2005), White Noise (1999) and A Thousand Acres (1991) the study explores particularities of American and Pakistani environmental discourse. Informed by interdisciplinary approaches like ecocriticism and toxic discourse the analysis seeks to demonstrate writers’ engagement with issues and concerns on environmental degradation. The purpose of the study is to explore the plurality of perspectives that are required to address the environmental contamination taking place globally. To understand the fundamental premise of how different cultures view and frame ecological crisis especially in the form of toxicity, pollution and contamination, this article briefly examines the selected Pakistani and American writers’ representation of their society’s ecological relationship with the living and non-living world recognising the complex altering relationship between the environment and the social sphere.
Highlights
1.1 Statement of the ProblemThe environmental discourse does not help to identify shared ecological issues such as—the concept of toxic contamination, impact of pollution, representation of contaminated public and private sphere, and the role of techno-chemical risks, and raises significant questions of individual and collective agency in distinct cultural contexts
According to Stibbe (2015), the connection between language and ecology is based on how humans treat the natural environment and each other which is influenced by our ideas, thoughts, concepts, ideologies and worldviews
This article draws upon ecocriticism and toxic discourse as a primary theoretical approach to explore various dimensions of ecological disintegration; sporadic contamination and toxic images which are seen responsible for generating possible threats to living and the nonliving environment simultaneously
Summary
1.1 Statement of the ProblemThe environmental discourse does not help to identify shared ecological issues such as—the concept of toxic contamination, impact of pollution, representation of contaminated public and private sphere, and the role of techno-chemical risks, and raises significant questions of individual and collective agency in distinct cultural contexts. Various linguistic features like metaphors, images and tropes used by Pakistani and American novelists underscore the relationality of the environmental problems and anthropocentric attitudes towards human-nature relationship which manifest human complicity without undermining the collective accountability towards perpetuating toxic scenarios. Why do the American and Pakistani Anglophone writers represent problems of ecology and human engagement with the environment in their works of fiction? The critical readings of the selected texts are significant especially in terms of how they capture the notion of contamination, toxic scenarios and risk associated with them. Such readings may help direct towards some implications that toxic discourse and risk might have for studying various themes in comparative analysis in literary studies as well. This study contributes to the growing field of comparative literature and ecocriticism
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