https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/issue/feed 2025-12-18T22:11:13+01:00 Brno Studies in English chovanec@phil.muni.cz Open Journal Systems <p>The journal publishes original research in the traditional fields English studies, i.e. linguistics, literature and translation studies. </p> https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/42607 2025-12-18T22:11:13+01:00 Jan Chovanec chovanec@phil.muni.cz Douglas Mark Ponton dmponton@gmail.com

Over the past couple of decades, ecological and environmental topics have become established as relatively common subjects for discourse analytical linguistic research. However, alongside the rising interest in the discursive representation of various issues related to the current problems of the day, such as global warming, environmental pollution, ecological disasters and natural catastrophes, we have seen the emergence of the new discipline of ecolinguistics. In this article, we briefly outline some of the central concerns of the 'ecolinguistic' approach to language study, and provide an overview of the papers that are included in the special issue 'Encounters with water: An ecolinguistic perspective', pointing out the common themes and the various methodological points of departure. The text concludes by suggesting that the ecolinguistic dimension, which is relevant for the exploration of both the language system and the actual language use, is understood as one of the possible components of the broadly defined context in which any language-based communicative activity is grounded.

2025-11-30T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/40462 2025-03-10T13:10:50+01:00 Elena Intorcia elenaint@unisannio.it

With a constant size growth, the cruise industry has become the fastest developing sector in modern tourism over the last decades. To satisfy growing demand from a broad and varied demographic, including families, couples, solo travelers, and retirees, cruise lines have been improving cruise ships' capacity and facilities at an impressively fast rate. Such a remarkable development has brought about an equally dramatic environmental impact, with the main problems regarding air, water and noise pollution, waste generation and disposal, invasive species in ballast water, as well as pressures exerted on fragile environments and host communities. The increasing popularity of cruise tourism has also drawn the attention of environmental groups and organisations that closely scrutinise the sector, urging for greater and more authentic sustainability. With water pollution being one of the major issues facing the booming ocean cruise industry, this paper investigates how the leading cruise companies discursively frame their impact on the water and sea conservation issue and legitimise their resulting social practices. A specialised corpus of twenty sustainability reports published from 2019 to 2023 on the companies' corporate websites is examined from a Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) perspective to explore the narratives they use to frame their environmental efforts, legitimise their operations, while minimising criticism. The research aims to contribute to scholarly CDS discussions on corporate legitimisation discourses, exemplified by the particular genre of sustainability reports, and to the recent ecolinguistic debates about the critical role of language in either promoting or hindering sustainability. The findings suggest that cruise companies adopt a strategic communication downplaying their environmental impact while discursively construing a self-legitimating corporate image.

2025-11-30T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/40702 2025-04-11T23:16:08+02:00 Luisa Marino luisa.marino@unina.it

With the rise of the so-called 'blue beauty', many beauty brands have had to adapt to the need to promote narrations and self-narrations that align with the urgency to care for the environment and minimize their impact on ocean health. Among the brands that prominently position themselves as environmentally friendly and ocean-conscious stands Biotherm. Drawing on a theoretical framework of Corporate Storytelling and employing a social semiotic approach to Multimodality, this article aims at analyzing how Biotherm communicates its corporate social responsibility (CSR), leveraging sustainability issues in its Blue Report, a free-toconsult, multimodal document, accessible on the company's website. In particular, the article addresses the interplay between verbal and non-verbal modes in constructing and disseminating Biotherm's brand narrations throughout the Blue Report. By means of multimodal analyses of selected double-spreads from the Blue Report and drawing on Alexandra Georgakopoulou's work on 'small stories' (2007, 2020, 2023), the article shows how 'grand', formal narratives about the company's CSR merge with 'small', semi-formal narratives in the verbal mode. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the extent to which non-verbal modes crucially facilitate the connection between 'grand' and 'small' narratives, enabling the brand to build (and disseminate) its reputation and foster stakeholder engagement around eco-themes like sustainability and the preservation of ocean health.

2025-11-30T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/41380 2025-07-09T17:58:15+02:00 Douglas Mark Ponton dmponton@gmail.com

This paper examines Philip Larkin's poetry through an ecolinguistic lens, exploring his understated yet profound engagement with the natural world. While Larkin is often regarded as a disenchanted poet of modernity, his works reveal a sensitivity to non-human agency, particularly in relation to water. Through an analysis of poems such as Water and Cut Grass, the study applies transitivity analysis and metaphorical reversal to highlight the way that Larkin subtly reconfigures ecological relationships, attributing agency to natural elements. His vision, though not conventionally environmentalist, challenges capitalist-consumerist ideologies and aligns with contemporary ecolinguistic concerns about re-centering the non-human. Larkin's elemental spirituality – seen in his emphasis on water and light – suggests an alternative to traditional religious structures, positioning nature as a site of transcendence. This study contributes to ecolinguistic discourse by demonstrating how poetic language can reframe human-nature relations in ways that resonate with ecological thought.

2025-11-30T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/40371 2025-02-24T22:28:42+01:00 Anna Raimo araimo@unisa.it

This research aims to examine how hydro-climatic phenomena – specifically glacial melting and sea level rise – are discursively framed in contemporary Italian media. To address the thematic and lexical limitations of general-purpose corpora, a dedicated dataset was compiled, consisting of 3,040 articles published between 2022 and 2024 in The Post Internazionale. The analysis focuses on two editorial sections, Politica (Politics) and Ambiente (Environment), combining methods from corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis to explore lexical patterns, rhetorical strategies, and discursive positioning. The study investigates how environmental meanings are constructed across these journalistic contexts, and how such representations reflect or resist dominant ideological frameworks. In doing so, it highlights the role of media language in shaping public understandings of climate change, and considers how institutional discourse may contribute to – or constrain – more critical engagement with ecological issues.

2025-11-30T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/40635 2025-04-01T14:18:18+02:00 Monika Christine Rohmer rohmer@uni-hildesheim.de

By a contrastive and comparative research between French and Wolof in Senegal, this paper interrogates in how far the conceptualisation of the environment is language-bound. This paper synthesises the psycholinguistic method Attribute Listing Task (ALT) with picture description, to create a comparative cognitive linguistic framework. In explaining the results of the mixed-methods approach, the paper draws on an awareness of cultural codes, which is in line with studies in anthropological linguistics. Such an interdisciplinary approach broadens the methodological framework of ecolinguistics to study fluid aspects of the environment as the sea. The study illustrates that while the conceptualisation of 'sea' largely corresponds between French and Wolof speakers, the conceptualisations of 'beach' significantly diverge. The Wolof term for 'beach', tefes, evokes words semantically related to fishing and has relevance as the entrance point to the sea. The terms associated with 'beach', plage, by French speakers point to the domains of sports, entertainment, and tourism. In describing photographs, French speakers, especially tourists, centrally utter their concern for plastic waste, while Wolof speakers point to an island in the background.

2025-11-30T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/40368 2025-02-23T12:54:17+01:00 Alena Soloshenko alena.soloshenko@gmail.com

This paper explores positive experiences of water expressed in French and their English translations, with a focus on wellbeing. Language shapes how we relate to nature, influencing our thoughts and behaviours. While patterns of positive framing of water are often overshadowed by negative discourses related to aquatic ecosystems, highlighting positive experiences is crucial for understanding water's role in healing and transformation. The tenets of cognitive linguistics motivate this study to analyse the conceptualisation of water showing how humans mentally structure positive water-human relationships through language and thought. Extending cognitive linguistic theory to an ecolinguistic framework offers a niche for studying water metaphors. These metaphors are not treated in isolation but are examined within a wellbeing context to identify patterns of rich sensory experiences and sustainable relationships with water. This is demonstrated through the qualitative analysis of 150 water metaphors that showcase the most prevalent ones related to wellbeing and the emotions they evoke, emphasising water's role as a restorative environment.

2025-11-30T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/40846 2025-05-06T16:55:20+02:00 Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan santiagorg.strachan@uva.es

The article explores the sense of placelessness in two collections of short fiction by Stuart Dybek: Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1980) and The Coast of Chicago (1990). It examines the role of vagrants in "The Palatsky Man", "Chopin in Winter", "The Wake", "Sauerkraut Soup" and "Nighthawks", in comparison with the places occupied by other characters. By using Jacques Derrida's notion of hospitality as a discourse on space, the article explore the function of place in these stories in terms of the degree of exclusion of marginal populations and explore the dichotomies of place/placelessness and inclusion/exclusion. The places he describes in his stories create a dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, one that he represents by placing vagrants and immigrants in specific narrative scenarios. There are indications that immigrants want to enter the area of inclusion, whereas this drive is less clear cut in the case of vagrants.

2025-11-30T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/41162 2025-06-24T11:40:16+02:00 Petra Kalavská petra.kalavska@upce.cz

The present article concentrates on British radical feminist drama, particularly on Ripen Our Darkness (1981) and Masterpieces (1983) by Sarah Daniels, the British feminist playwright, and aims to suggest that radical feminist theatre responds to the call of the French literary critic Hélène Cixous for writing specifically by and for women. The article studies the influence of radical feminist theory on radical feminist theatre in Britain and explores new forms and styles which enable radical feminist playwrights, and Sarah Daniels in particular, to re-examine and fragment classic realism. The analysis of the two plays, which achieved mainstream success and which Daniels wrote at the beginning of her career, aims to propose that the theatrical style corresponds with the character of the plays as Daniels supports the radical feminist debate by subversive and innovative theatrical strategies which complement the feminist character of her work.

2025-11-30T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/38693 2024-11-12T17:31:12+01:00 Mariia Karacheva mariia.karacheva@student.ukf.sk Martina Juričková mjurickova@ukf.sk

This article explores the representation of women in the novels of Suzanne Collins, 'The Hunger Games' trilogy (2008-2010) and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020) via a comparative analysis of the two main heroines, Katniss Everdeen and Lucy Gray Baird. Due to the success and the cultural impact of the Hunger Games dystopian universe, it is important to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the heroines who came to represent the current cultural trend for strong female main characters in Young Adult novels. This work utilizes feminist literary frameworks and analyses previously done in studies of 'The Hunger Games' universe to highlight the underlying feminist messaging of the books, as well as aims to demonstrate the parallels and differences between the heroines. Specific focus is on their gender presentation, constructed personalities, feelings of identity, performing roles and the effect their respective backgrounds have on the narrative.

2025-11-30T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/42608 2025-12-18T22:11:13+01:00 Michael Matthew Kaylor kaylor@phil.muni.cz

The writings of the Ulster novelist Forrest Reid hark back to his childhood as well as to that of humanity — the Greco-Roman period. As one critic would relate, "[Reid] sought, in Belfast, to live in accordance with the spirit of Greek Mediterranean culture." Reid's Demophon: A Traveller's Tale (1927) shares bountiful biographical resonances with his first autobiography, Apostate, published only a year before. In Apostate, Reid writes: "[In childhood] my deities were the Arcadian gods, the lesser gods, Pan and Hermes," and especially "Hermes was a kind of divine playmate." Similarly, for adult Forrest Reid his protagonist Demophon (as well as Tom, the young protagonist of his magnum opus The Tom Barber Trilogy) "grew to be extraordinarily real," which, in the case of Demophon, was intensified after the British printmaker Stephen Gooden expressed an interest in providing engravings for Reid's chronicle of this Greek boy's search for his beloved Hermes.

2025-11-30T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/39250 2025-03-11T18:16:13+01:00 Dorottya Mózes mozes.dorottya@arts.unideb.hu

This article explores how Black geographies shape experiences of melancholia and pleasure in Edward P. Jones's Lost in the City (1992). It examines how movement through Washington, D.C. — understood as Black flânerie — becomes a means of processing complex emotions in African American life. In "A New Man," Woodrow and Rita Cunningham struggle with melancholia after their teen daughter's disappearance, using the city to navigate grief, though they cannot fully move forward. Similarly, in "Lost in the City," Lydia Walsh, a successful Yale-educated lawyer, directs the driver to intentionally lose her in the city. Her movement through familiar landmarks reflects her negotiation of loss, shock, and memory in the aftermath of her mother's death. Through the application of the concept of Black flâneur to these characters, the article demonstrates how slow loss, melancholia, and complex pleasure are woven into the fabric of Jones's Black literary geographies.

2025-11-30T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright © https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/41377 2025-07-09T16:11:08+02:00 Hossein Davari h.davari@du.ac.ir Amir Ghorbanpour amir.ghorbanpour@modares.ac.ir 2025-11-30T00:00:00+01:00 Copyright ©