Language Acts: How Words Make Things Happen

This work addresses the performative nature of language: the connection between language and performance; in essence, it will address how words make things happen. The connection between language and performance is explored in two very distinct ways via extended essays. The first essay looks at the connection between language performance and ecosystems through the lens of endangered languages and their relationship to ecosystem health and the world’s current wave of species extinction, and argues that language may have a biological role in the natural world. The second essay explores the idea of “language acts” through the academic methods of performance studies and research-creation. In this essay, a biographical play and dramatization of writer Emily Brontë contends that Brontë was a proto-modernist artist. This work also serves as an exercise, a language act, in making connections and in making meaning, through the lens of the GLS experience.