Individual Presentation or Panel Title
Tangled in their Roots: Magic, Linguistics, and Ecofeminism in Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle
Abstract
Five teenagers walk into a magic forest and suddenly their words and thoughts have the power to shape reality. This central premise of The Raven Cycle, a young adult fantasy series by Maggie Stiefvater, reveals a tension of agency when it comes to magic. Are the teenagers creating and changing reality through their words, or is the forest, a sentient character in its own right, doing all the magical heavy lifting, listening to their words and responding with change? Using the linguistic theory of J. L. Austin, I argue that the magic of this series happens through collaborative speech-acts, requiring intimate cooperation between the teenagers and the forest. I then posit that this collaboration serves as a kind of healing force in not only linguistic but also psychoanalytic and ecofeminist theories. The unity between humans and nature in this text starts to collapse the dichotomies that form the structure of our language, reversing the process of maturity laid out by Lacan in his work on the Mirror Stage and creating a different understanding of the relationship between humanity and the environment.
Location
Goodwin Private Dining Room
Start Date
30-4-2016 3:30 PM
End Date
30-4-2016 4:20 PM
Keywords
linguistics, literary criticism, ecofeminism, YA fantasy
Tangled in their Roots: Magic, Linguistics, and Ecofeminism in Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle
Goodwin Private Dining Room
Five teenagers walk into a magic forest and suddenly their words and thoughts have the power to shape reality. This central premise of The Raven Cycle, a young adult fantasy series by Maggie Stiefvater, reveals a tension of agency when it comes to magic. Are the teenagers creating and changing reality through their words, or is the forest, a sentient character in its own right, doing all the magical heavy lifting, listening to their words and responding with change? Using the linguistic theory of J. L. Austin, I argue that the magic of this series happens through collaborative speech-acts, requiring intimate cooperation between the teenagers and the forest. I then posit that this collaboration serves as a kind of healing force in not only linguistic but also psychoanalytic and ecofeminist theories. The unity between humans and nature in this text starts to collapse the dichotomies that form the structure of our language, reversing the process of maturity laid out by Lacan in his work on the Mirror Stage and creating a different understanding of the relationship between humanity and the environment.