Alexa Weik von Mossner

Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt · Department of English and American Studies

Roland Emmerich's disaster blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow appeals to both rational thinking and emotions as it tells its tale of abrupt and catastrophic climate change, turning current perceptions of risk—anticipated catastrophes, as Ulrich Beck calls them—into audio-visual spectacles that have a direct visceral effect on the viewer. The essay...

The essay explores the emotional and political valence of melodramatic storytelling in Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich. It uses the analytical tools of cognitive film theory to explore the ways in which Erin Brockovich employs affective appeals to engage viewers in its melodramatic representation of a historical case of environmental injustice....

Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide confronts its topophilic, place-bound characters with worldly people who move in space and across cultures. Members of this latter group of people must naturally appear as intruders or at least outsiders to those of the former, and the gaps in understanding between the two groups are an important theme in the no...

Spike Lee's four-hour HBO documentary film When the Levees Broke about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath uses the tragic events around the storm as an occasion to consider the continued significance of race and class in the inequitable distribution of environmental hazards in the United States, while at the same time celebrating traditional New O...

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 narr...

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 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...

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. Important...

The article aims to complement contextual analyses of the political, ideological and commercial uses of natural environments in Australian landscape cinema by exploring from a cognitive perspective exactly how such environments are foregrounded in ways that affect viewers’ emotional relationships to both characters and the environments themselves....

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 Mountai...

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 storytel...

This chapter introduces a cognitive ecocritical approach that draws on research in affective neuroscience and cognitive ethology to explore the role of anthropomorphism and trans-species empathy in viewers’ engagement with nonhuman characters in wildlife documentaries. It argues that recent ethological research casts a new light on neurologist Vitt...

The article focuses on the psychological dimensions of readers’ engagements with young adult climate change fiction. It argues that that the embodied simulation of a fictional climate-changed world can offer much more than simple entertainment or escapism. Instead, it has the potential to impact teenagers’ understanding of the social, economic, and...

Charles W. Chesnutt hoped that inviting his white readers to empathize with likeable African American characters would lead them to reconsider their racist prejudices. Paul Marchand F.M.C. (not published until 1998) is a particularly interesting example because it features a protagonist whose racial identity changes over the course of the story, ul...

From its inception, ecocriticism has placed great trust in the ability of environmental narratives to have lasting effects on the attitudes and behavior of readers, yet until recently there has been little interest in analyzing the emotionalizing strategies of such texts from a narratological perspective. Introducing the pioneering econarratologica...

Special Issue: Whose Anthropocene? Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Four theses.” Edited by Robert Emmett and Thomas Lekan. Full issue here: http://www.environmentandsociety.org/perspectives/2016/2/whose-anthropocene-revisiting-dipesh-chakrabartys-four-theses

The essay explores how the virtual environments of films come alive for viewers on the sensory and emotional level through the use of cinematic technology. The first part of the essay considers the ways in which the technical conventions of film production and exhibition take into account the embodied and embedded nature of human perception and cog...

The chapter chapter brings together recent scholarship in ecocinema studies, ecofeminism, and queer ecology, suggesting some ways in which an integration of feminist film theory might further enlarge and enhance the analytical scope of the gender-related study of ecocinema.

Documentary filmmakers have recently begun focusing on the vulnerable ecologies of low-lying islands, among them Briar March’s There Once Was an Island and Jon Shenk’s The Island President. The strength of documentary film is that it can make visible the gradual and long-distance ecological effects of climate change while also confronting viewers w...

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Applying Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” to Briar March’s climate change documentary There Once Was an Island, the chapter examines the ways in which the future existence of the tiny Pacific atoll of Takuu hinges not only on local but also on global developments. Due to rising sea levels, the vanishing beaches of Takuu are losing their prote...

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of Cosmopolitan Minds (2014), published in the literary magazine The Scofield. Examining the work of the American expatriate writer Kay Boyle, it explores the role of empathy and sympathy in the writing and reading of literary texts. It pays particular attention to Suzanne Keen’s concept of authorial strate...

Covering the time span from 2021 to 16000 N.C., Dale Pendell’s speculative novel The Great Bay chronicles the profound climatic, geological and ecological transformations that California undergoes during these fourteen millennia. Human life becomes unimaginably small on such a time scale, and Pendell responds to that representational challenge by c...

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 actio...

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...

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 prompte...

Global ecocide is usually envisioned as catastrophe of traumatic proportions. One alternative mode of narration is presented in Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E, in which the long-term effects of total global ecocide make for a terrific romantic comedy and biting satire. As an animated feature, WALL-E can approach the aftermath of global ecocide in a much m...

The chapter focuses on the ways in which Hollywood films have represented the material and emotional dimensions of nuclear risk and on how these representations engage viewers. James Bridges’s The China Syndrome and Mike Nichols’s Silkwood both frame their representation of risk as suspense-driven political thrillers and in both cases the fictional...

In recent years, a number of documentary filmmakers have been trying to alert audiences to the potential future catastrophes caused by climate change. The chapter examines the emotional dimensions of such documentaries and gives attention to the question of whether they engage our emotions in ways that are in any way different from those we experie...

The dystopian mood, defined by Peter Fitting as “the sense of a threatened near future”, has been a dominant feature of much of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, and, in recent years, it has found particularly powerful expression in the young adult novel. Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Last Survivors series imagines the possible social...

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The essay takes a close look at the uses of computer-animated footage in climate change documentaries. Drawing on the work of scholars who have concerned themselves with the rhetorical uses of images in environmentalist discourse and recent work in film theory, it explores how CGI imaging invites viewers to respond emotionally when contemplating th...

Shot by the New Orleans-based film-making collective Court 13 in the bayous of Louisiana featuring local lay people, Benh Zeitlin’s Academy Award-winning Beasts of the Southern Wild tells the story of a disenfranchised community that struggles for survival in a fictional wetland area called the Bathtub on the “wrong side” of the Louisiana levees. W...

In their introduction to Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (2001), Kathleen Wallace and Karla Armbruster encour-age us to explore the merit of ecocritical approaches to texts that are "as far 'beyond nature writing' as the works of Henry James would seem" (7)—a writer who was much more interested in the life of Europea...

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Review of Goodbody & Rigby's Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches

The essay is concerned with the ways in which contemporary science fiction films explore the future subjectivities and societies that may result from radical ecological changes, looking at two pertinent examples from two different national traditions: John Hillcoat’s 2009 film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize - winning novel The Road...

Paul Lindsay's Before the Flood (2004), Briar March's There Once Was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho (2010), and Michael Nash's Climate Refugees (2010) all focus on the consequences of climate change for the common people in different parts of the world. This article investigates the ways in which the three documentaries promote ecologically conscious...

In one of the key moments of William Gardner Smith's 1963 novel The Stone Face, the African American expatriate Simeon Brown passes near the Odéon metro station in Paris when he is hailed by a man speaking in thickly accented English. "Hey," the stranger shouts, "How does it feel to be a white man?" (Stone Face 55). Simeon is startled at this outbu...

Yung Chang’s 2007 documentary film Up the Yangtze focuses on the human cost of the Three Gorges Dam in Central China, the currently largest hydro-electric power project in the world. About 1.3 million people have been displaced and “resettled” during the construction of the dam due to the slowly rising water level in the reservoir. Chang’s poetic f...

Identity and ecology are closely interwoven in the autobiographical texts of Lakota writer Zitkala-Ša. Born on a reservation in the prairies of South Dakota, Zitkala-Ša was educated in Quaker mission schools in the “Red Apple Country” of Indiana, and later became a teacher at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Interpellated by stron...

In her 1990 novel There Is a Tide the South African-born Mauritian novelist Lindsey Collen writes about cultural memory, food and the manifold risks of production and consumption. Particularly interesting from an ecocritical perspective is the novel's foregrounding of the fact that the same transnational forces that work on human bodies and minds a...

Key words: environmental ethics, acoustic ecology, environmental risk, interdisciplinarity While from a formal perspective, ecocriticism barely exists in Swiss literature departments, there is significant interest and publications on environmental approaches to literature and culture, under different guises. Research on concepts of landscape, natur...

The paper offers an ecocritical reading of Percival Everett’s novel Watershed, emphasizing the continuities between the civil rights struggle and the environmental justice movement that Robert Bullard and other influential scholars in the field have seen. There are no easy or natural alliances in the novel between African American and Native Americ...

Kay Boyle’s early fiction, written during her expatriation in France and Austria in the 1920s and 30s, is a case in point for Martha Nussbaum’s assertion that powerful literature is “always cosmopolitan.” Presenting heroines who are drifting, wandering, and utterly displaced, Boyle asks her reader to understand and indeed to feel what emotional pri...

As an African American in 20th-century America, Wright occupied an outsider-insider position in his home country; he cultivated what he called his “double vision,” a Du Boisian double consciousness, a power that facilitated his cosmopolitan development. Wright’s painful location both inside and outside of American society—to say nothing of the larg...