Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Cognitive Approaches to Culture)

Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Cognitive Approaches to Culture)

Alexa Weik von Mossner
$39.95
This product is not returnable.
Publication Date: May 16th, 2017
Publisher:
Ohio State University Press
ISBN:
9780814254011
Pages:
0
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Description

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.
 

About the Author

Alexa Weik von Mossner is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria.

Praise for Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Cognitive Approaches to Culture)

“Its wide range of material, deep familiarity with ecocritical debate, and innovative use of insights from the cognitive sciences makes Weik’s study an important addition to environmental scholarship in general, and to ongoing inquiries into the role of empirical approaches in ecocriticism in particular.” —Journal of Literary Theory
 

“Affective Ecologies breaks genuinely new ground and uses a body of theory, concepts, and critical tools that can significantly contribute to strengthening or falsifying the claims of ecocritics about the psychological and political impacts of environmental writing and film, which have so far remained largely speculative. This is a book with real potential for transformative impact.”—Ursula Heise, author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global.
 

“The field of cognitive cultural studies has exploded in the past decade or so, and this study fits precisely into this field. As someone who has been working in the field of ‘psychological ecocriticism’ for the past quarter-century, I can say that I’ve been waiting a long time for exactly this kind of book to appear!” —Scott Slovic, coeditor of Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data and Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism
 
 

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