MADELINE MILLER'IN KIRKE ADLI ESERİNİN EKO-DiLBİLİMSEL ANALİZİ: FARKLI VARLIK BİÇİMLERİ ARASINDAKİ İLİŞKİLERİN FİGÜRATİF KAVRAMSALLAŞTIRMALARLA YENİDEN İNŞASI

Madeline Miller, 21. yüzyılın en ünlü "revizyonist mit yaratıcılarından" biridir. Miller'in ödüllü romanı Kirke (2019), mitolojik hikayelerin yeniden gözden geçirilip, mitolojik eril tarihi kadın bakış açısıyla yeniden yaratma girişimidir. Angela Carter ve Margaret Atwood gibi; Madeline Miller, var olan hikayeleri feminist bir bakış açısıyla yeniden yazarak edebi kanonu oluşturan fallogosantrik anlatıları yapıbozuma uğratmayı amaçlar. Bunu yapmak için, erkek yazar tarafından kaleme alınan The Odyssey'de küçük bir karakter olarak görülmesine karşın korku salan bir büyücü olan Kirke'nin efsanesini, Kirke'nin bakış açısından yeniden yazmıştır. Miller ne yapmayı amaçladığını şöyle açıklamaktadır: "Hikayenin merkezinde onun olmasını istedim. Bir kadının hayatı hakkında destansı bir hikaye olmasını istedim. Aşil ve Odysseus gibi kahramanların hikayelerinde bulunan, tüm maceraların ve karakter gelişiminin, hatalarının, erdemlerinin, onda toplanmasını istedim" (Nicolau, 2018, s. 7). Bu anlamda Kirke bir "kadın destanı" veya "mitografik bir üstkurmaca" olarak tanımlanabilir (Nunes, 2014, s. 231–232). Miller, bakış açısıyla birlikte, erkek-merkezli destanlarda yer alan egemen ideolojileri de değiştirmiş ve ekolojik bir anlayışla erkek merkezciliği ve hiyerarşik dünya görüşünü alt üst etmiştir. Bu çalışma, Miller'ın evrendeki tür içi ve türler arası ilişkilere dair yeni bir anlayışı teşvik etmek için yararlandığı yaratıcı dil kullanımına vurgu yapacaktır. Bu makale Miller'ın dil seçimlerini eko-dilbilimsel bir yaklaşımla incelemeyi, özellikle onun teşbihleri kullanma biçimine odaklanarak, benzetme sanatını ne sıklıkta kullandığını ve Miller’ın sistematik seçimlerinin ne gibi söylemsel etkiler yarattığını ve romanda kullanılan teşbihlerin hangi ideolojiyi yansıttıklarını bulmayı amaçlamaktadır. Kirke romanında yazarın kullandığı benzetme sanatlarına dair yapılan eko-dilbilimsel inceleme, Miller'ın ekosofik bilgelik olarak nitelendirilebilecek vizyonunu yansıtmak için ekolojiye duyarlı dili ve düşünceyi ustaca bir araya getirdiğini ortaya koymaktadır.

AN ECOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF CIRCE BY MADELINE MILLER: RECONSTRUCTING THE RELATIONS AMONG DIFFERENT FORMS OF BEINGS THROUGH FIGURATIVE RECONCEPTUALIZATIONS

Madeline Miller is one of the most renowned "revisionist mythmakers" in the 21st century. Miller's prize-winning novel Circe (2019) is an attempt to recreate the histories of the mythological past in the revised versions of herstories. Madeline Miller intends to deconstruct the phallogocentrict narrations which have established the literary canon by recreating the same stories from a feminist perspective. To do so, she rewrites the myth of Circe who is a formidable sorceress and is treated as a minor character in the male-authored The Odyssey. Miller explains what she aims to do as follows: "I wanted her to be the center of the story. I wanted it to be an epic story about a woman's life. And for her to have all the attention and all the adventures and the growth, the errors,the virtues,that heroes like Achilles and Odysseus have in their stories" (Nicolau, 2018, p. 7). In this sense Circe can be described as a "female epic" or a "mythographic metafiction" (Nunes, 2014, pp. 231-232). Miller, along with the perspective, changed the dominant ideologies embedded in man-centered epics and she subverted androcentrism and a hierarchical view of the world with her ecological insight. This article will place the emphasis on Miller's creative use of language through which she promotes a novel understanding of intra and inter-specific relations in the universe. Thus, it will examine Miller's stylistic choices with an ecolinguistic approach by focusing specifically on her use of similes to find out why she employs this figure of speech with high frequency and what discursive effects she has created and what ideological implications her use of similes offer. The ecolinguistic examination of how and why she employs the similes in Circe reveals that Miller skillfully brings together an ecologically conscious language and thought to reflect her vision which can be characterized as ecosophic wisdom.

___

  • Alghamdi, N. A. (2019). Socio-pragmatic representation of animal in Al-Bahah proverbs: An ecolinguistic analysis. Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana, 24(6), 274–284.
  • Armstrong, K. (2008). A short history of myth. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.
  • Bakhtin, M. M. (2002). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin (M. Holquist, Ed.; C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
  • Barei, S. N. (2015). La cultura y sus retóricas Miradas interdisciplinares.
  • Barei, S. N., & Ahumada, E. P. M. (2008). Pensar la cultura: Perspectivas retóricas. Grupo de Estudios de Retórica.
  • Capra, F. (1997). The web of life: A new scientific understanding of living systems. New York: Anchor.
  • Chen, S. (2016). Language and ecology: A content analysis of ecolinguistics as an emerging research field. Ampersand, 3(1), 108–116.
  • David Punter. (2007). Metaphor. New Critical Idiom (E-book). London: Routledge.
  • Epley, N., Waytz, A., Akalis, S., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2008). When we need a human: Motivational determinants of anthropomorphism. Social Cognition, 26(2), 143–155.
  • Epley, N., Waytz, A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2007). On seeing human: A three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. Psychological Review, 114(4), 864.
  • Forti, T. (2008). Animal imagery in the Book of Proverbs (Vol. 118). Brill.
  • Foucault, M. (2017). Of other spaces: Utopias and heterotopias. Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité (J. Miskowiec, Trans.).
  • Haugen, E. (2001). The ecology of language. The ecolinguistics reader: Language, ecology and environment, 57–66.
  • Hume, D. (1957). The natural history of religion. California: Stanford University Press.
  • Indriyanto, K. (2021). An ecolinguistic analysis of the Wind Gourd of La'amaomao. International Journal of Humanity Studies (IJHS), 5(1), 97–108.
  • Johnson, W. O. (1955). The Conception of God as supra-personal yet personal. Journal of Bible and Religion, 23(4), 256–265.
  • Kjärgaard, M. S. (1986). Metaphor and parable: A systematic analysis of the specific structure and cognitive function of the synoptic similes and parables qua metaphors. Copenhagen: Brill Archive.
  • Knowles, M., & Moon, R. (2004). Introducing metaphor. London: Routledge.
  • Korten, D. C. (2007). The great turning: From empire to earth community. San Fransisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
  • Kovecses, Z. (2010). Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxfordshire: Oxford university press.
  • Kravchenko, A. V. (2016). Two views on language ecology and ecolinguistics. Language Sciences, 54, 102–113.
  • Kull, K. (1998). Semiotic ecology: Different natures in the semiosphere. Σημε$ıota$ømega$τκ$\acute\eta$-Sign Systems Studies, 26(1), 344–371.
  • Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
  • Lefkowitz, M. R., & Lefkowitz, M. R. (2007). Women in Greek myth. Baltimore: JHU Press.
  • Lorenz, D. C. (1999). Man and animal: The discourse of exclusion and discrimination in a literary context. Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture, 14(1), 201–224.
  • Lotman, J. (1988). Natural environment and information. Lectures in Theoretical Biology. Tallinn: Valgus, 45–47.
  • Mackenthun, G. (2016). Imperiality, deep time, and indigenous landmark epistemologies in North America. SpaceTime of the Imperial, 1, 48.
  • Macmillan, C. (2019). The Witch (ES) of Aiaia: Gender, Immortality and the Chronotope in Madeline Miller's. Gender Studies, 18(1), 27–38.
  • Maran, T. (2001). Mimicry: Towards a semiotic understanding of nature. Σημε$ıota$ømega$τκ$\acute\eta$-Sign Systems Studies, 29(1), 325–339.
  • Metzner, R. (1993). The emerging ecological worldview. The Bucknell Review, 37(2), 163.
  • Miller, J. (2015). The globalization of space: Foucault and heterotopia. London: Routledge.
  • Miller, M. (2019). Circe. Grupo Editorial Patria.
  • Mokoagouw, M. E. (2018). Environments triple dimensions in fairytales: A dialectical ecolinguistics perspective. International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Culture, 4(4), 10–16.
  • Nicolau, E. (2018). How this author is rewriting the Odyssey to place a woman front and center. Refinery29. Com, April, 10.
  • Nöth, W. (2001). Ecosemiotics and the semiotics of nature. Σημε$ıota$ømega$τκ$\acute\eta$-Sign Systems Studies, 29(1), 71–81.
  • Nunes, R. (2014). Looking into Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad: Appropriation, parody and class issues. Palimpsesto-Revista Do Programa de Pós-Graduação Em Letras Da UERJ, 13(18), 228–240.
  • Perangin-Angin, D. M., & Dewi, N. (2020). An ecolinguistic analysis of folksongs in endangered Pagu language. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 17(5).
  • Pick, A., & Narraway, G. (2013). Intersecting ecology and film. Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human, New York: Berghahn Books, 1–18.
  • Ponce, A. G. (2016). Ecosemiotic aspects of zoomorphic metaphors: The human as a predator. Σημε$ıota$ømega$τκ$\acute\eta$-Sign Systems Studies, 44(1–2), 231–247.
  • Richards, I. A. (1965). The philosophy of rhetoric. Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press.
  • Ricoeur, P. (2004). The rule of metaphor: The creation of meaning in language. New York: Routledge.
  • Rinkauskaitė, E., & Selmistraitis, L. (2011). Zoomorphic idioms expressing human unhappiness in English and Lithuanian. Žmogus Ir Žodis, 32–39.
  • Rips, L. J. (1975). Inductive judgments about natural categories. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 14(6), 665–681.
  • Schroll, M. A. (2007). Wrestling with Arne Naess: A chronicle of ecopsychology's origins. The Trumpeter, 23(1).
  • Schultes, H. (2012). Flowers of fancy, a collection of similes taken from various authors. Ulan Press.
  • Sebeok, T. A. (2001). Signs: An introduction to semiotics. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
  • Stack, G. J. (1980). Nietzsche and anthropomorphism. Crítica: Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía, 41–71.
  • Steffensen, S. V., & Fill, A. (2014). Ecolinguistics: The state of the art and future horizons. Language Sciences, 41, 6–25.
  • Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. London: Routledge.
  • Travis, P. W. (1997). Chaucer's Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor. Speculum, 72(2), 399–427.
  • Ulbricht, J. (2005). JC Holz revisited: From modernism to visual culture. In Art Education (Vol. 58, Issue 6, pp. 12–17). New York: Taylor & Francis.
  • VandenBos, G. R. (2007). APA dictionary of psychology. American Psychological Association.
  • White, R. W. (1959). Motivation reconsidered: The concept of competence. Psychological Review, 66(5), 297.
  • Wu, Y. (2018). Ecological discourse analysis. 2018 4th International Conference on Social Science and Higher Education (ICSSHE 2018).
  • Zhou, W. (2017). Ecolinguistics: Towards a new harmony. Language Sciences, 62, 124–138.
  • Zuo, X. (2019). An Ecological Analysis of Emily Dickinson's" The Grass". Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 9 (7), 849–853.