Text, language and environment: From Ecocriticism to EcoLinguistics

Literary theory as a whole examines the relationship between authors, texts, and the world. In most literary theories, "world" is synonymous with community - the social sphere. Environmental critique and green studies extend the concept of "world" to include the whole environment. If we agree with the first law of the environment, that everything has to do with something else, we must say that literature as a linguistic text does not float at a higher level than the physical world, as an aesthetic element, but literature actually plays a role in a complex world. It plays a world in which energy, objects and ideas interact. For this reason, today, language and how it is used can serve as a metaphorical and symbolic representation of nature, as well as have a critical orientation towards environmental crises. This article, which is a qualitative research, has dealt with the relationship between linguistic text and the environment through analytical methods, and by analyzing the intellectual and theoretical frameworks of environmental critique, has also considered the issue of environmental linguistics. Examples discussed in this article include examples of poetic literature and dramatic literature. In fact, the main issue of this article is related to the key question of how the linguistic text (literature) can deal with the environmental crises of the contemporary world beyond the classical methods of literary criticism. It is an important human issue to assume linguistic responsibility.