Aldo Leopold and us: Person deixis as a rhetorical strategy in Barbara Kingsolver’s introduction to A Sand County almanac

Abstract

This paper focuses on the use of person deixis in the framing of a new edition of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County almanac: And sketches here and there (1949). This celebrated non-fiction work, considered one of the most important books on ecology and environmentalism ever written, has been published in many editions in 15 languages, with more than two million copies printed. The recent 2020 OUP edition is particularly interesting from a pragmatic point of view, for the way it is targeted to a new generation of readers thanks to an introduction by the author Barbara Kingsolver. Here, deixis is effectively employed to overcome what Kingsolver calls the “full-metal culture war” between conservationists and conservatives. Her ecumenical use of several varieties of the “inclusive we” (Yule, 1996, p. 11) may be considered part of a strategic manoeuvring aimed to create “communion” (van Eemeren & Houtlosser, 1999, p. 485) between the two opposing parties, while at the same time averting a risk of cancellation that Kingsolver perceives in “the heat of modern culture wars”.