‘I graze my senses on the meadows’. Michał Książek’s narrative of nature

The main purpose of the following paper is to pinpoint the linguistic expressions of nature and human-nature relations in Droga 816 (2015) by Michał Książek. The analysed book documents a growing interest of Polish literature in environmental issues. It represents the so-called nature or environmental writing: a long-established literary tradition in Anglo-American literature, little known in the Polish literary landscape. The proposed analysis draws on the embodied - or, more broadly, grounded - cognition approach (Barsalou 1999, 2008; Gibbs 2003, 2005, 2006; Lakoff & Johnson 1999) which emphasizes the formative role of bodily experiences and sensorimotor capacities in human cognitive processes and linguistic behaviours. An additional theoretical foundation is provided by the notion of the linguistic worldview (Bartmiński 2009/12), whose basic assumption is that the use of language offers insight into the way we conceive of the world in general and the self in relation to nature in particular. The main points of interest are the concepts of wildness/wilderness, natureculture (Haraway 2003), anthropo- and biocentrism as well as the author’s linguistic creativity expressing itself e.g. in various novel (synaesthetic) metaphors aimed at conveying his (multisensory) perception of the natural world.

Keywords: Michał Książek; nature writing; (synaesthetic) metaphor; bio/anthropocentrism; embodiment/embodied cognition; sensory linguistics