Alexa Weik von Mossner | Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (original) (raw)

Books by Alexa Weik von Mossner

Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology explores the relationship between narra... more Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology explores the relationship between narrative, race, and ethnicity in the United States. Situated at the intersection of post-classical narratology and context-oriented approaches in race, ethnic, and cultural studies, the contributions to this edited volume interrogate the complex and varied ways in which ethnic American authors use narrative form to engage readers in issues related to race and ethnicity, along with other important identity markers such as class, religion, gender, and sexuality. Importantly, the book also explores how paying attention to the formal features of ethnic American literatures changes our under-standing of narrative theory and how narrative theories can help us to think about author functions and race. The international and diverse group of contributors includes top scholars in narrative theory and in race and ethnic studies, and the texts they analyze concern a wide variety of topics, from the representation of time and space to the narration of trauma and other deeply emotional memories to the importance of literary paratexts, genre structures, and author functions.

Affective Ecologies is an exploration of our emotional engagement with environmental narrative. F... more Affective Ecologies is an exploration of our emotional engagement with environmental narrative. Focusing on the American cultural context, the book develops an ecocritical approach that draws on the insights of affective science and cognitive narratology in order to give us a better understanding of how we interact with such narratives in ways that are both biologically universal and culturally specific. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the thesis that our minds are both embodied (in a physical body) and embedded (in a physical environment), not only when we interact with the real world but also in our engagement with imaginary worlds. How do we experience the virtual environments we encounter in literature and film on the sensory and emotional level? How do environmental narratives invite us to care for human and nonhuman others who are put at risk? And how do we feel about the speculative futures presented to us in ecotopian and ecodystopian texts? These are the central questions that are explored in the three parts of the book, questions that are important for anyone with an interest in the emotional appeal and persuasive power of environmental narratives.

In Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, international scholars investigate ho... more In Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, international scholars investigate how films portray human emotional relationships with the more-than-human world and how such films act upon their viewers’ emotions. Emotion and affect are the basic mechanisms that connect us to our environment, shape our knowledge, and motivate our actions. Contributors explore how film represents and shapes human emotion in relation to different environments and what role time, place, and genre play in these affective processes. Individual essays resituate well-researched environmental films such as An Inconvenient Truth and March of the Penguins by paying close attention to their emotionalizing strategies, and bring to our attention the affective qualities of films that have so far received little attention from ecocritics, such as Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man.

The collection opens a new discursive space at the disciplinary intersection of film studies, affect studies, cognitive approaches to film emotion, and a growing body of ecocritical scholarship. It will be of interest not only to scholars and students working in the field of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, but for everyone with an interest in our emotional responses to film.

During World War II and the early Cold War period, factors such as race, gender, sexual orientati... more During World War II and the early Cold War period, factors such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or class made a number of American writers feel marginalized in U.S. society. Cosmopolitan Minds focuses on a core of transnational writers—Kay Boyle, Pearl S. Buck, William Gardner Smith, Richard Wright, and Paul Bowles—who found themselves prompted to seek experiences outside of their home country, experiences that profoundly changed their self-understanding and creative imagination as they encountered alternative points of views and cultural practices in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Alexa Weik von Mossner offers a new perspective on the affective underpinnings of critical and reflexive cosmopolitanism by drawing on theories of emotion and literary imagination from cognitive psychology, philosophy, and cognitive literary studies. She analyzes how physical dislocation, and the sometimes violent shifts in understanding that result from our affective encounters with others, led Boyle, Buck, Smith, Wright, and Bowles to develop new, cosmopolitan solidarities across national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. She also shows how, in their literary texts, these writers employed strategic empathy to provoke strong emotions such as love, sympathy, compassion, fear, anger, guilt, shame, and disgust in their readers in order to challenge their parochial worldviews and practices. Reading these texts as emotionally powerful indictments of institutionalized racism and national violence inside and outside of the United States, Weik von Mossner demonstrates that our emotional engagements with others—real and imagined—are crucially important for the development of transnational and cosmopolitan imaginations.

Since the 1980s, “risk” has been one of the most productively employed categories of analysis in ... more Since the 1980s, “risk” has been one of the most productively employed categories of analysis in the social sciences. Risk theory and risk research in these disciplines have shown that pervasive risk awareness has increasingly reconfigured societies, politics, and cultures in our period of late modernity. The essays assembled in this volume extend risk research in the humanities to literary and cultural studies and analyze a wide range of literary and audiovisual texts that imagine human encounters with environmental risk in North America. They are grouped into three sections. The first section focuses on representations of the risk of global climate change in several climate change novels; the second section concentrates on the representation of the nuclear risk in non-fictional and fictional texts as well as in film; the third section draws particular attention to the relevance of genre in the representation of a variety of environmental risks, genres ranging from poetry to posthuman fiction to Hollywood disaster movies and video games.

Articles and Book Chapters by Alexa Weik von Mossner

Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change, 2023

The introduction to Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change, edited by... more The introduction to Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change, edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, W.P. Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder. Forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press on August 1, 2023. Find it here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/empirical-ecocriticism.

English Studies, 2023

Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) presents a dark vision of what the United States might devolv... more Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) presents a dark vision of what the United States might devolve into if climate change, haphazard adaptation, and the political polarisation of the country continue unchecked. Analysing the four overarching facets of trace—visibility, materiality, environment, and human interaction—on the level of the novel’s narrative composition, the article argues that El Akkad offers more than just a cognitively estranged story about the making of a future American terrorist. Foregrounding the complex relationship between its central protagonist’s personal losses and the bitter war she fights in a climate-changed environment, American War deliberately employs what El Akkad has called “weaponized empathy” to allow readers to understand on a visceral level what drives people’s thoughts and actions once they have been robbed of the things and people they care for and embody the traces of what has been lost.

Cultural Memory From the Sciences to the Humanities , 2022

The chapter explores how the complex relationships between food, memory, and culture are represen... more The chapter explores how the complex relationships between food, memory, and culture are represented and evoked in ethnic American cultural texts. Memories of food are more than just personal recollections of a particular dish—they are both intensely personal and embedded in larger collective memories, dietary traditions, and culinary practices. They also play an important role in identity formation and sustain social and cultural worlds, not only in the place in which they were formed but also in diasporic communities far away from that place of origin. This is particularly obvious in a country like the United States with its long history of immigration. For successive waves of immigrants, the dishes they consumed and cherished became a means of negotiating the degree of their assimilation to mainstream U.S. culture, on the one hand, and a means to hold on to their cultural roots, on the other. The chapter considers a conjunction of literature and film—among them Shoba Narayan’s Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes, Jumpha Lahiri’s short story “Mrs. Sen’s,” Jason Zeldes’s Ugly Delicious episode “Don’t Call It Curry,” and David Kaplan’s feature film Today’s Special—that represent and remember the culinary traditions of India and, by extension, those of Indian Americans. Making connections between empirical-scientific and historical-interpretative levels of analysis, the chapter demonstrates that narrated food memories, along with the sensual evocation of the remembered dishes and their preparation, play an important role in how writers and filmmakers invite their audiences to appreciate and celebrate the food and cultural identity of an ethnic minority group. Whether it is the visceral evocation of specific dishes and/or their preparation that is foregrounded or characters’ personal relationship to them (or both), such acts of narrativization always comment to some degree on issues of identity and U.S. racial politics.

Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology, 2022

Introduction to Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology. Introduces and contex... more Introduction to Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology. Introduces and contextualizes some of the contributions' critical
concerns: (1) Alternative Temporalities, Historical Recentering, and
Spatial Renegotiations; (2) (Re)focalization, Remembrance, and Emotional Memory; and (3) Form, Intertext, Paratext, and, again, Context.

Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology, 2022

Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava traces her life journey from the United States to Jorda... more Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava traces her life journey from the United States to Jordan and back, highlighting the crucial role that food has played on those transnational relocations. Not only is food presented as means of maintaining a deep emotional connection to the Middle East in Abu-Jaber’s own, culturally hybrid, family, but it also serves to engage readers in stories about a culture and community they might find unfamiliar and, in a post-9/11 world, even anxiety-inducing. The chapter approaches Abu-Jaber’s memoirs from a cognitive narratological angle to highlight how the texts’ affectively charged food memories are related to issues of language and cultural identity while also serving as a formal structuring device. It argues that the combination of life writing, vivid food evocations, and accompanying recipes encourages readers to use the memoir as cookbook and to thereby extend their engagement with Arab-American culture beyond the reading experience.

Res Rhetorica, 2021

The article examines the narrative strategies of two documentary films that give insight into the... more The article examines the narrative strategies of two documentary films that give insight into the direct-action campaigns of two radical environmental groups; Jerry Rothwell's How to Change the World (2015) recounts the birth of Greenpeace and its development of "mindbomb" communication strategies. Marshall Curry's If a Tree Falls (2011) chronicles the rise and fall of the Earth Liberation Front and its tactics of ecotage. Situating both fi lms in the larger history of radical environmentalism in the United States, the article explores the affective side of their rhetoric on two levels: on the level of the activists' own communication strategies and on the level of the films made about these activists and their strategies. It argues that making a documentary film about radical environmentalist groups raises moral questions for the filmmaker and that, each in his way, Rothwell and Curry have both made films that straddle the line between ostensible objectivity and sympathetic advocacy for the individuals they portray.

Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media

The documentary Cowspiracy has been remarkably successful in making viewers uncomfortable about t... more The documentary Cowspiracy has been remarkably successful in making viewers uncomfortable about the relationship between the consumption of animal products and climate change. This chapter combines a cognitive analysis of Cowspiracy’s rhetorical strategies with the experiences the author had in teaching the film to a group of Austrian students in a seminar on Climate Change Cinema. Many students felt for the first time that their personal choices mattered in fighting climate change, but they were also overwhelmed by the prospect that this moral choice would involve changing their eating habits. The chapter discusses the potential of such emotional responses in light of scholarship on the “rhetorical form” of documentary film, as well as relevant literature on vegan advocacy, climate change communication, and climate veganism.

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2020

This is the introduction to a thematic cluster (mini special issue) of articles on Empirical Ecoc... more This is the introduction to a thematic cluster (mini special issue) of articles on Empirical Ecocriticism in the Spring 2020 issue of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, co-edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and W.P. Małecki. It introduces empirical ecocriticism, a novel, interdisciplinary form of environmental criticism that combines social scientific and humanistic methodologies to empirically examine the influence of environmental texts on their audiences. It describes the ways that empirical ecocriticism picks up on convictions about the influence of environmentally engaged literature on readers’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that have always been central to ecocriticism. It describes what empirical ecocriticism does and doesn’t do, how it might productively contribute to ecocriticism, and the kind of scholarship and synergies that might be possible in the future. /// The other articles in the cluster are: 1) Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, "'Just as in the Book’? The Influence of Literature on Readers’ Awareness of Climate Justice and Perception of Climate Migrants,” https://tinyurl.com/justasinthebook. 2) W.P. Małecki, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and Małgorzata Dobrowolska, “Narrating Human and Animal Oppression: Strategic Empathy and Intersectionalism in Alice Walker’s ‘Am I Blue?,’” https://academic.oup.com/isle/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isaa023/5843531. 3) Pat Brereton and Maria Victoria Gomez, “Media Students, Climate Change, and YouTube Celebrities: Readings of Dear Future Generations: Sorry Video Clip," https://academic.oup.com/isle/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isaa021/5862597?redirectedFrom=fulltext.

ISLE : Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2020

There is a growing consensus across disciplines that narratives are of central importance to our ... more There is a growing consensus across disciplines that narratives are of central importance to our relationships with other humans and nonhumans as well as the broader environment. However, until recently ecocritics have largely relied upon speculation to assess the critical question of the influence of environmental narratives on their audiences. This is due in part to the lack of interdisciplinary cooperation between humanists and social scientists in assessing how environmental narratives across various mediums contribute to our understanding of the world around us and our place in it. So as to better understand this critical question, we are organizing an edited collection dedicated to empirical ecocriticism. We hope that it will begin to address this lacuna, ask valuable empirical, theoretical, and methodological questions, and encourage both ecocritics and environmental social scientists to conduct similar research in the future.

In Cultural Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences, edited by Gabriele Rippl and Torsten Meireis, 194-208. New York and London: Routledge., 2018

The essay takes the recent resurge of interest in dystopian fiction as a starting point for an in... more The essay takes the recent resurge of interest in dystopian fiction as a starting point for an investigation into the relationship between speculative storytelling and the cultural discourse on sustainability. Drawing on the work of sociologists Shai Dromi and Eva Illouz, it suggests that eco-dystopian texts are cultural critiques in the sense that they present readers with a dilemma and then imbue that dilemma with emotional value. It argues that Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is a pertinent example of such a critique in that it invites readers to share the moral dilemma of its hypherempathetic protagonist while making them viscerally aware of the environmental and social conditions that have caused that dilemma.

European journal of literature, culture and the environment, 2020

Our relationships to the environments that surround, sustain, and sometimes threaten us are... more Our relationships to the environments that surround, sustain, and sometimes threaten us are fraught with emotion. And since, as neurologist Antonio Damasio has shown, cognition is directly linked to emotion, and emotion is linked to the feelings of the body, our physical environment influences not only how we feel, but also what we think. Importantly, this also holds true when we interact with artistic representations of such environments, as we find them in literature, film, and other media. For this reason, our emotions can take a rollercoaster ride when we read a book or watch a film. Typically, such emotions are evoked as we empathize with characters while also inhabiting emotionally the storyworlds that surround these characters and interact with them in various ways. Given this crucial interlinkage between environment, emotion, and environmental narrative in the widest sense, it is unsurprising that, from its inception, the study of literature and the environment has bee...

Research Handbook in Communicating Climate Change, 2020

Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology, edited by Erin James and Eric Morel, 2020

Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology explores the relationship between narra... more Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology explores the relationship between narrative, race, and ethnicity in the United States. Situated at the intersection of post-classical narratology and context-oriented approaches in race, ethnic, and cultural studies, the contributions to this edited volume interrogate the complex and varied ways in which ethnic American authors use narrative form to engage readers in issues related to race and ethnicity, along with other important identity markers such as class, religion, gender, and sexuality. Importantly, the book also explores how paying attention to the formal features of ethnic American literatures changes our under-standing of narrative theory and how narrative theories can help us to think about author functions and race. The international and diverse group of contributors includes top scholars in narrative theory and in race and ethnic studies, and the texts they analyze concern a wide variety of topics, from the representation of time and space to the narration of trauma and other deeply emotional memories to the importance of literary paratexts, genre structures, and author functions.

Affective Ecologies is an exploration of our emotional engagement with environmental narrative. F... more Affective Ecologies is an exploration of our emotional engagement with environmental narrative. Focusing on the American cultural context, the book develops an ecocritical approach that draws on the insights of affective science and cognitive narratology in order to give us a better understanding of how we interact with such narratives in ways that are both biologically universal and culturally specific. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the thesis that our minds are both embodied (in a physical body) and embedded (in a physical environment), not only when we interact with the real world but also in our engagement with imaginary worlds. How do we experience the virtual environments we encounter in literature and film on the sensory and emotional level? How do environmental narratives invite us to care for human and nonhuman others who are put at risk? And how do we feel about the speculative futures presented to us in ecotopian and ecodystopian texts? These are the central questions that are explored in the three parts of the book, questions that are important for anyone with an interest in the emotional appeal and persuasive power of environmental narratives.

In Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, international scholars investigate ho... more In Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, international scholars investigate how films portray human emotional relationships with the more-than-human world and how such films act upon their viewers’ emotions. Emotion and affect are the basic mechanisms that connect us to our environment, shape our knowledge, and motivate our actions. Contributors explore how film represents and shapes human emotion in relation to different environments and what role time, place, and genre play in these affective processes. Individual essays resituate well-researched environmental films such as An Inconvenient Truth and March of the Penguins by paying close attention to their emotionalizing strategies, and bring to our attention the affective qualities of films that have so far received little attention from ecocritics, such as Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man.

The collection opens a new discursive space at the disciplinary intersection of film studies, affect studies, cognitive approaches to film emotion, and a growing body of ecocritical scholarship. It will be of interest not only to scholars and students working in the field of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, but for everyone with an interest in our emotional responses to film.

During World War II and the early Cold War period, factors such as race, gender, sexual orientati... more During World War II and the early Cold War period, factors such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or class made a number of American writers feel marginalized in U.S. society. Cosmopolitan Minds focuses on a core of transnational writers—Kay Boyle, Pearl S. Buck, William Gardner Smith, Richard Wright, and Paul Bowles—who found themselves prompted to seek experiences outside of their home country, experiences that profoundly changed their self-understanding and creative imagination as they encountered alternative points of views and cultural practices in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Alexa Weik von Mossner offers a new perspective on the affective underpinnings of critical and reflexive cosmopolitanism by drawing on theories of emotion and literary imagination from cognitive psychology, philosophy, and cognitive literary studies. She analyzes how physical dislocation, and the sometimes violent shifts in understanding that result from our affective encounters with others, led Boyle, Buck, Smith, Wright, and Bowles to develop new, cosmopolitan solidarities across national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. She also shows how, in their literary texts, these writers employed strategic empathy to provoke strong emotions such as love, sympathy, compassion, fear, anger, guilt, shame, and disgust in their readers in order to challenge their parochial worldviews and practices. Reading these texts as emotionally powerful indictments of institutionalized racism and national violence inside and outside of the United States, Weik von Mossner demonstrates that our emotional engagements with others—real and imagined—are crucially important for the development of transnational and cosmopolitan imaginations.

Since the 1980s, “risk” has been one of the most productively employed categories of analysis in ... more Since the 1980s, “risk” has been one of the most productively employed categories of analysis in the social sciences. Risk theory and risk research in these disciplines have shown that pervasive risk awareness has increasingly reconfigured societies, politics, and cultures in our period of late modernity. The essays assembled in this volume extend risk research in the humanities to literary and cultural studies and analyze a wide range of literary and audiovisual texts that imagine human encounters with environmental risk in North America. They are grouped into three sections. The first section focuses on representations of the risk of global climate change in several climate change novels; the second section concentrates on the representation of the nuclear risk in non-fictional and fictional texts as well as in film; the third section draws particular attention to the relevance of genre in the representation of a variety of environmental risks, genres ranging from poetry to posthuman fiction to Hollywood disaster movies and video games.

Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change, 2023

The introduction to Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change, edited by... more The introduction to Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change, edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, W.P. Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder. Forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press on August 1, 2023. Find it here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/empirical-ecocriticism.

English Studies, 2023

Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) presents a dark vision of what the United States might devolv... more Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) presents a dark vision of what the United States might devolve into if climate change, haphazard adaptation, and the political polarisation of the country continue unchecked. Analysing the four overarching facets of trace—visibility, materiality, environment, and human interaction—on the level of the novel’s narrative composition, the article argues that El Akkad offers more than just a cognitively estranged story about the making of a future American terrorist. Foregrounding the complex relationship between its central protagonist’s personal losses and the bitter war she fights in a climate-changed environment, American War deliberately employs what El Akkad has called “weaponized empathy” to allow readers to understand on a visceral level what drives people’s thoughts and actions once they have been robbed of the things and people they care for and embody the traces of what has been lost.

Cultural Memory From the Sciences to the Humanities , 2022

The chapter explores how the complex relationships between food, memory, and culture are represen... more The chapter explores how the complex relationships between food, memory, and culture are represented and evoked in ethnic American cultural texts. Memories of food are more than just personal recollections of a particular dish—they are both intensely personal and embedded in larger collective memories, dietary traditions, and culinary practices. They also play an important role in identity formation and sustain social and cultural worlds, not only in the place in which they were formed but also in diasporic communities far away from that place of origin. This is particularly obvious in a country like the United States with its long history of immigration. For successive waves of immigrants, the dishes they consumed and cherished became a means of negotiating the degree of their assimilation to mainstream U.S. culture, on the one hand, and a means to hold on to their cultural roots, on the other. The chapter considers a conjunction of literature and film—among them Shoba Narayan’s Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes, Jumpha Lahiri’s short story “Mrs. Sen’s,” Jason Zeldes’s Ugly Delicious episode “Don’t Call It Curry,” and David Kaplan’s feature film Today’s Special—that represent and remember the culinary traditions of India and, by extension, those of Indian Americans. Making connections between empirical-scientific and historical-interpretative levels of analysis, the chapter demonstrates that narrated food memories, along with the sensual evocation of the remembered dishes and their preparation, play an important role in how writers and filmmakers invite their audiences to appreciate and celebrate the food and cultural identity of an ethnic minority group. Whether it is the visceral evocation of specific dishes and/or their preparation that is foregrounded or characters’ personal relationship to them (or both), such acts of narrativization always comment to some degree on issues of identity and U.S. racial politics.

Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology, 2022

Introduction to Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology. Introduces and contex... more Introduction to Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology. Introduces and contextualizes some of the contributions' critical
concerns: (1) Alternative Temporalities, Historical Recentering, and
Spatial Renegotiations; (2) (Re)focalization, Remembrance, and Emotional Memory; and (3) Form, Intertext, Paratext, and, again, Context.

Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology, 2022

Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava traces her life journey from the United States to Jorda... more Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava traces her life journey from the United States to Jordan and back, highlighting the crucial role that food has played on those transnational relocations. Not only is food presented as means of maintaining a deep emotional connection to the Middle East in Abu-Jaber’s own, culturally hybrid, family, but it also serves to engage readers in stories about a culture and community they might find unfamiliar and, in a post-9/11 world, even anxiety-inducing. The chapter approaches Abu-Jaber’s memoirs from a cognitive narratological angle to highlight how the texts’ affectively charged food memories are related to issues of language and cultural identity while also serving as a formal structuring device. It argues that the combination of life writing, vivid food evocations, and accompanying recipes encourages readers to use the memoir as cookbook and to thereby extend their engagement with Arab-American culture beyond the reading experience.

Res Rhetorica, 2021

The article examines the narrative strategies of two documentary films that give insight into the... more The article examines the narrative strategies of two documentary films that give insight into the direct-action campaigns of two radical environmental groups; Jerry Rothwell's How to Change the World (2015) recounts the birth of Greenpeace and its development of "mindbomb" communication strategies. Marshall Curry's If a Tree Falls (2011) chronicles the rise and fall of the Earth Liberation Front and its tactics of ecotage. Situating both fi lms in the larger history of radical environmentalism in the United States, the article explores the affective side of their rhetoric on two levels: on the level of the activists' own communication strategies and on the level of the films made about these activists and their strategies. It argues that making a documentary film about radical environmentalist groups raises moral questions for the filmmaker and that, each in his way, Rothwell and Curry have both made films that straddle the line between ostensible objectivity and sympathetic advocacy for the individuals they portray.

Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media

The documentary Cowspiracy has been remarkably successful in making viewers uncomfortable about t... more The documentary Cowspiracy has been remarkably successful in making viewers uncomfortable about the relationship between the consumption of animal products and climate change. This chapter combines a cognitive analysis of Cowspiracy’s rhetorical strategies with the experiences the author had in teaching the film to a group of Austrian students in a seminar on Climate Change Cinema. Many students felt for the first time that their personal choices mattered in fighting climate change, but they were also overwhelmed by the prospect that this moral choice would involve changing their eating habits. The chapter discusses the potential of such emotional responses in light of scholarship on the “rhetorical form” of documentary film, as well as relevant literature on vegan advocacy, climate change communication, and climate veganism.

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2020

This is the introduction to a thematic cluster (mini special issue) of articles on Empirical Ecoc... more This is the introduction to a thematic cluster (mini special issue) of articles on Empirical Ecocriticism in the Spring 2020 issue of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, co-edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and W.P. Małecki. It introduces empirical ecocriticism, a novel, interdisciplinary form of environmental criticism that combines social scientific and humanistic methodologies to empirically examine the influence of environmental texts on their audiences. It describes the ways that empirical ecocriticism picks up on convictions about the influence of environmentally engaged literature on readers’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that have always been central to ecocriticism. It describes what empirical ecocriticism does and doesn’t do, how it might productively contribute to ecocriticism, and the kind of scholarship and synergies that might be possible in the future. /// The other articles in the cluster are: 1) Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, "'Just as in the Book’? The Influence of Literature on Readers’ Awareness of Climate Justice and Perception of Climate Migrants,” https://tinyurl.com/justasinthebook. 2) W.P. Małecki, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and Małgorzata Dobrowolska, “Narrating Human and Animal Oppression: Strategic Empathy and Intersectionalism in Alice Walker’s ‘Am I Blue?,’” https://academic.oup.com/isle/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isaa023/5843531. 3) Pat Brereton and Maria Victoria Gomez, “Media Students, Climate Change, and YouTube Celebrities: Readings of Dear Future Generations: Sorry Video Clip," https://academic.oup.com/isle/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isaa021/5862597?redirectedFrom=fulltext.

ISLE : Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2020

There is a growing consensus across disciplines that narratives are of central importance to our ... more There is a growing consensus across disciplines that narratives are of central importance to our relationships with other humans and nonhumans as well as the broader environment. However, until recently ecocritics have largely relied upon speculation to assess the critical question of the influence of environmental narratives on their audiences. This is due in part to the lack of interdisciplinary cooperation between humanists and social scientists in assessing how environmental narratives across various mediums contribute to our understanding of the world around us and our place in it. So as to better understand this critical question, we are organizing an edited collection dedicated to empirical ecocriticism. We hope that it will begin to address this lacuna, ask valuable empirical, theoretical, and methodological questions, and encourage both ecocritics and environmental social scientists to conduct similar research in the future.

In Cultural Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences, edited by Gabriele Rippl and Torsten Meireis, 194-208. New York and London: Routledge., 2018

The essay takes the recent resurge of interest in dystopian fiction as a starting point for an in... more The essay takes the recent resurge of interest in dystopian fiction as a starting point for an investigation into the relationship between speculative storytelling and the cultural discourse on sustainability. Drawing on the work of sociologists Shai Dromi and Eva Illouz, it suggests that eco-dystopian texts are cultural critiques in the sense that they present readers with a dilemma and then imbue that dilemma with emotional value. It argues that Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is a pertinent example of such a critique in that it invites readers to share the moral dilemma of its hypherempathetic protagonist while making them viscerally aware of the environmental and social conditions that have caused that dilemma.

European journal of literature, culture and the environment, 2020

Our relationships to the environments that surround, sustain, and sometimes threaten us are... more Our relationships to the environments that surround, sustain, and sometimes threaten us are fraught with emotion. And since, as neurologist Antonio Damasio has shown, cognition is directly linked to emotion, and emotion is linked to the feelings of the body, our physical environment influences not only how we feel, but also what we think. Importantly, this also holds true when we interact with artistic representations of such environments, as we find them in literature, film, and other media. For this reason, our emotions can take a rollercoaster ride when we read a book or watch a film. Typically, such emotions are evoked as we empathize with characters while also inhabiting emotionally the storyworlds that surround these characters and interact with them in various ways. Given this crucial interlinkage between environment, emotion, and environmental narrative in the widest sense, it is unsurprising that, from its inception, the study of literature and the environment has bee...

Research Handbook in Communicating Climate Change, 2020

Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology, edited by Erin James and Eric Morel, 2020

Poetics Today, 2019

Cognitive ecocriticism draws on research in neuroscience and cognitive narratology to explore how... more Cognitive ecocriticism draws on research in neuroscience and cognitive narratology to explore how literary reading can lead us to care about natural environments. Ann Pancake’s novel Strange as This Weather Has Been (2007) serves as an example of a novel that cues both direct and empathetic emotions for an actual environment—the Appalachian Mountains—that is wounded and scarred. I argue that the novel’s protagonists allow readers to imaginatively experience what it is like to love an environment and then witness its destruction by mountaintop removal mining. Pancake’s decision to relate large parts of the story through the consciousness of teenagers allows for highly emotional perspectives that have the potential to engage readers in the social and moral issues around resource extraction.

The Dark Side of Translation, edited by Federico Italiano, 2020

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2018

The essay takes the virtual experience of Hurricane Harvey in the American media as a starting po... more The essay takes the virtual experience of Hurricane Harvey in the American media as a starting point for an exploration of what George Lakoff’s notion of cognitive framing can contribute to ecocritical discourse. Lakoff notes that it is not easy to change cognitive frames once they have become firmly established, but suggests that engaging storytelling is precisely what can get us to, quite literally, change our minds. The essay explores from a cognitive ecocritical perspective just how elastic our minds really are and what narratives strategies environmentally oriented storytellers have developed in order to change them.

In Cli-Fi: A Companion, edited by Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra, 133-139. Berne and New York: Peter Lang., 2018

This short essay introduces Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow as an important if controver... more This short essay introduces Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow as an important if controversial cli-fi film that had a signficant impact on audiences at the time of its release and a lasting influence on the genre.

In Cli-Fi: A Companion, edited by Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra, 123-129. Berne and New York: Peter Lang. , 2018

This short essay introduces Franny Armstrong's The Age of Stupid as an important cli-fi film that... more This short essay introduces Franny Armstrong's The Age of Stupid as an important cli-fi film that effectively mixes fiction and nonfiction elements for a dire warning about the detrimental consequences of unmitigated climate change.

Transnational Social Review, 2015

it along towards a politics of solidarity, social justice, and transformative social change. As t... more it along towards a politics of solidarity, social justice, and transformative social change. As the authors in this chapter have acknowledged, “frameworks for human rights – for women, for migrants, and for all persons – are not self-enforcing” and “historical social relations between nation-states, economic and political agendas, and rigidity in administration make this collaboration ineffective” (p. 382). Therefore, the conversation needs to shift away from a rights discourse within systems of domination and oppression to envision more socially just alternatives.