Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film

by Alexa Weik von Mossner (Editor)

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, 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.

296 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 2014

About the author

Alexa Weik von Mossner is a writer and scholar. She holds a PhD in Literature from UC San Diego and is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt. Her research explores contemporary environmental culture with a particular focus on affect and emotion. She is the author of several academic books and over 100 articles and book chapters. On the fiction side, she has penned over 160 episodes of the German TV drama series FABRIXX as well as several short stories and a novel, FRAGILE.