Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative

By Alexa Weik von Mossner. Ohio State University Press: Columbus, OH 2017.

Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative explores our emotional engagement with environmental narrative. Focusing on the American cultural context, Alexa Weik von Mossner develops an ecocritical approach that draws on the insights of affective science and cognitive narratology. This approach helps to clarify how we interact with environmental 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? Weik von Mossner explores these central questions that are important to anyone with an interest in the emotional appeal and persuasive power of environmental narratives.

Alexa Weik von Mossner is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Minds (2014), editor of Moving Environments (2014), and co-editor of The Anticipation of Catastrophe (2014).