The Conclusion formulates the ethical role that I attribute to multi-scalar poetics in the context of an accelerating ecological crisis. I argue that narrative fiction can enable response-ability towards multiple scales of life and scale-bound perspectives. I expand the concept of scalar irony, which I defend here as an eco-political mode of attention that fiction enables for the reader. Returning to the question of analogy, I argue against the temptation to hierarchise non-analogical tropes above analogical ones, and propose that literature’s power lies in its capacity to turn all tropes into sites of epistemic and ethical negotiation.

Chapter 3 discusses the critical potential of environmental synecdoche in works of fiction that question the autonomy of human agency. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014) mock fantasies of control by portraying humans as inseparable from multi-scalar assemblages and symbiotic associations. I read these novels as experiments in the cognitive modelling of agency at unfamiliar scales: both the microscale of a postgenomic imaginary and the macroscale of planet and species demanded by Anthropocene awareness. These fictions, I suggest, explore the difficulty of reconciling environmental responsibility with the dispersal of agency inherent to biomedical and ecological perspectives. Both novels experiment with multi-scalar tropes as a means of modelling agency at unfamiliar scales and enabling environmental response-ability. In each narrative, I contrast the lure of analogical images with the poetics of critical synecdoche, which engages productively with the complexity of diffuse environmental agency.

The chapter opens with an overview of basic categories within the field of study of lexical semantics. It next presents fundamental concepts related to the lexicon, especially the lexeme as the basic unit of lexicology. It also analyzes the concept of lexical meaning and provides a brief overview of some of the approaches adopted in the study of denotation and connotation. The central part of the chapter describes polysemy and its basic mechanisms – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche. The examples feature Serbian and other Slavic lexemes exhibiting the richest polysemy. The next section tackles syntagmatic lexical relations, the notion of collocation and the role of context in the study of lexical meaning. Paradigmatic lexical relations are also observed, especially synonymy and antonymy, both true and contextual or quasi-.

The Afterword considers the ways the Chorus to Henry V focalizes the temporal and representational resonances of Shakespeare at war, in his own time and across the succeeding centuries.