Degradation of Ecosystems in the Road Novel "Dictionary of the English Language" by Akvilina Cicėnaitė

Abstract

The article examines Akvilina Cicėnaitė’s novel Dictionary of the English Language (2022) as a contemporary road narrative that reinterprets the genre through an ecocritical perspective. The authors argue that the protagonist’s journey from Sydney into the Australian interior traces parallel degradations—of ecosystems and of language. The novel’s dictionary form structures the narrative, merging linguistic definitions with ecological observation and revealing the interdependence between the erosion of meanings and the destruction of the natural world. Cicėnaitė’s text records the traces of the Anthropocene—drought, fire, mining, depopulation—while simultaneously diagnosing the semantic crisis of English as both a colonial and global instrument. The analysis interprets the novel as a “laboratory of scale,” where micro-observations of matter and geological macro-perspectives form an ecopoetics of detail and an ethics of witnessing. At the center of the reflection lies the question of whether the world can be “repaired” through attentive naming—renaming as an ethical and cognitive act. The novel thus redefines the relationship between language, identity, and landscape, offering a model of reading in which linguistic attentiveness becomes a form of environmental care.