STRATEGIC POLITENESS: A PRAGMATIC STUDY OF RICHARD POWERS ‘THE OVERSTORY

Abstract

The present study represents a practical discussion of strategic politeness in Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers novel The Overstory (2018) exploring how language strategies create and define environmental activism and the human-nature interactions. The research uses a qualitative and interpretive methodology based on the literary pragmatics and eco- pragmatics with close textual analysis of 28 purposely chosen passages of the novel that relied on the Politeness Theory by Brown and Levinson (positive, negative, bald-on- record, and off-record strategies), as well as the Speech Act Theory by Searle, complemented by the ecolinguistics by Stibbe and the notion of face created by Goffman. The results show that politeness is a strong ideological machine: positive politeness strategies build activist solidarity and work towards interspecies kinship, negative politeness is a finely crafted strategy in negotiating power inequalities, bald-on-record is a feature of an ethical break, and off-record strategies enable subversion and transcendent knowledge. Finally, Powers restructures politeness as an ecological praxis, which goes beyond the anthropocentrism to apply a relational ethics that is appropriate to the Anthropocene, thus placing.