Title: Return to “Nature”: Language and Science in A. S. Byatt’s Babel Tower

Abstract: A. S. Byatt’s interests cover both art and science and concern natural history and scientific research in both her fictional and critical works. For instance, the association between science and language in Babel Tower goes beyond issues of the symbol and the language-reality relationship. From the perspective of “nature,” with insights from environmental hermeneutics and Gadamer’s views of language, the relationship between language and the world reveals a new interweaving of words and things. In this novel, environment and language have intersected in the discussion of whether nature can articulate. Since Byatt believes in the ability of language to describe the world, she interprets the descriptive ability of language in the grammatical structure of human language. The theory of language teaching is also based on the understanding of human subjects and grammatical rules.

Keywords: A. S. Byatt, Babel Tower, nature, language, science

Author: Chenghe Yao, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Studies, Capital University of Economics and Business, Beijing, China.