Representation of Plants in Discourse

How are plants represented? How can ecomultimodality shed light on how plants tend to be neglected in verbal communication? And how can it contribute to reframing how plants are perceived in role, action and interaction with their ecosystems?Answering these questions and more, this book brings plants to life by investigating their representations in a diverse range of texts including institutional texts promoting environmental sustainability, educational texts about the present climate crisis, texts from tribal people defending their existence on the land, scientific popularization of plant studies, and literary texts offering plant perspectives. It examines how plants tend to be framed in three ways: as passive and inanimate resources to be exploited, as positive assets in the climate crisis, or as active participants in the ecosystems which require respect and care.The book emphasises the importance of plants to our ecosystem sustainability by exploring how they have been misrepresented as unimportant in much of our modern-day discourse. It argues for an ecomultimodal approach which centres on the embodied quality of plant life, on relations, interspecies interactions and behaviours. The author investigates notions of individuality, collectivity, action, interaction and agency, in order to identify abilities, affordances and relations which are other-than-human and other-than-animal. As well as counteracting ‘plant neglect’, this book suggests alternative discursive ways to understand interaction within ecosystems, reframe our relation with the lifescapes we are part of, and gain insights into verbal and multimodal representations of one of the most widespread life domains.