A Critical Stylistic Study of Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility

Abstract

The current study endeavors to scrutinize the bestseller Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel from a critical stylistics perspective. More precisely, two important tools, namely naming and describing and representing actions/events are implemented in the study. Accordingly, the current paper sets itself the task of answering the following questions: (1) how do the naming and describing strategies build and naturalize the experiences of crisis and vulnerability; (2) how do linguistic decisions influence the representation of agency, responsibility, and power relations in the novel. As such, it is hypothesized that (1) the use of abstract nouns, nominalization, and generalized categorization is prevalent in the novel to help put the phenomena of pandemics and societal collapse in the context of an imminent and depersonalized one; (2) material processes are quite often represented in passive or agentless forms, which leads to systematic backgrounding of human agency and foregrounding of systems, technologies, and historical forces as the main actors. To answer the above questions and test the hypotheses, the study adopts the critical stylistic model presented by Jeffries (2010) to analyze extracts from the novel. Findings of the analysis validate the two hypotheses showing a coherent ideological orientation where crises are being introduced as inevitable circumstances and not as something produced socially and where the power is also diffused and inaccessible.