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New Book by Alumna Alexa Weik von Mossner

Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative

07.07.2017

Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Ohio State University Press, 2017) 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.