Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative

Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2025

This paper examines how recent posthuman narratives articulate in literature and film a set of essential ethical and political dimensions through which to rethink human relationships with the environment. Drawing on the works of Timothy Morton and Greg Garrard, I examine how the narratives in J.M. Coetzee’s novels and Jia Zhangke’s films invite expanded affective engagement toward landscapes, animals, and objects. By contrast, I would argue that these narratives lure audiences into forging regenerative relationships with the nonhuman world through the erasure of rigid human-nature binary opposition and the subversion of traditional human-centred stories. Drawing on the theory of environmental imagination as expounded by Lawrence Buell, this essay examines how these stories function as ecocentric ecologies of cultural meaning. This approach, drawing on multiple disciplines, deepens our appreciation of the ethical underpinnings of these stories and the nuances involved in the nature-culture divide. Further, I utilise the empirical understanding gained from empirical ecocriticism. Therefore, this work examines how posthuman stories’ immersive settings and narrative techniques can influence ecological awareness and pro-environmental behaviour. The current research accentuates the stories’ ability to shift ecological consciousness, hence pressing readers and viewers toward developing a sense of kinship with non-human agents and engaging in ethics toward nature. In other words, this research posits that posthuman narratives represent a cultural methodology through which a sustainable, interconnected future may be shaped within an ecological paradigm, which is also constantly changing.

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2020

What seem like “new” developments in Ecocriticism have actually been nascent, articulated in conversations and blogs, soon emerging in presentations and print over the past five or more years. Responding to climate change numbing, ecocritics have explored the potential “arithmetic of compassion” (Slovic & Slovic 2015) and the “caring exhaustion” that arises when the numbers of those suffering—humans, animals, ecosystems—becomes too high to encompass. Human responses to the increasingly frightening scenarios of climate change futures have been termed “eco-anxiety” and “eco-grief” (Hutner 2015; Ray 2019). New developments in ecocriticism arise through the nexus of econarratology, affective ecocriticism, empirical ecocriticism, and mindful /Zen ecocriticism. I discuss this continuing trajectory in ecocriticism, developing from econarrative through ecoaffect (approaches that describe readers’ responses to climate change narratives) and on to empirical and mindful / Zen ecocriticis...

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2016

The research project and essay film Road to Utopia seeks to film changes to the ecology, in poetic or affective cinematic registers, with the aim to evoke an emotional response in the Viewer. Working from the position that fear-inducing documentary polarizes popular opinion, might a poetic and affective mode of visual and aural inquiry offer another method of communicating anthropogenic climate change? The project is focused on late-capitalist human addiction to fossil fuels, and the infrastructure that supports our ever-escalating dependence on oil. The project was filmed over three months, in 2013, from Northern Canada (Fort MacMurray and Edmonton) to Southern California (Palm Springs and the Salton Sea). The presentation will look at three images from the film and attempt to unpack what is affective and/or poetic about them as individual shots or as core samples of temporal space and altered place.

English Studies

Ecozon@, European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 17(1), 2026

Scientific communication about the ongoing ecological crisis is not working effectively; other approaches are needed in order to reduce psychological distancing and indifference. The article moves from the premise that ecopoetry is such an approach because it has the ability to provoke an emotional reaction in readers-that is, it carries affective affordances. But how does an ecopoem engender affective engagement in readers? Theoretically, the article brings together hitherto disconnected disciplinary perspectives from ecocriticism, psychology, affect theory, and ecology, to build theoretical grounding for the arguments that affective engagement is crucial in environmental communication, and therefore ecopoetry is uniquely positioned to address ecological topics. Analytically, the article focuses on the poems by UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage included in the Cryosphere pamphlet. It identifies and discusses a set of narrative and thematic approaches-developing a sense of place; activating the senses through synaesthesia; stimulating emotional connection through individuation; inviting participation in melancholia; and embracing vulnerability-which are deployed to engender affective engagement in readers. In so doing, the article contributes to create a better understanding of the affective and ecological potential of poetry.

ECO-CONCEPTS CRITICAL REFLECTIONS IN EMERGING ECOCRITICAL THEORY AND ECOLOGICAL THOUGHT, 2024

What happens when we move from reason to affect? What, after all, is affect? And what – borrowing the term from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – lines of flight (32) does it offer? First and foremost, affect does not equal emotion (as it might appear at first sight): as argued by Brian Massumi, emotion is only a (subjectified and rationalized) remainder of affective content (28) – thus affect is not something that is uniquely human. To experience affect, one does not need to be a human, to have reason, or even, strictly speaking, be ‘alive’ – instead, what one needs is to be entangled in a network of relations with others. This entanglement, relationality, (co-, inter-, infra-, …)dependence is the starting point of what I call in this paper ‘affective ecocriticism’ – ecocriticism that operates from the difficult to grasp conceptually yet very tangible and palpable position of affect. The introduction of the affective dimension into ecocriticism allows us to rethink our ‘locatedness’ in larger ecosystems from the perspectives of interconnectedness (immanent ontology, Spinoza), molecular actors (‘becoming-molecule’, Deleuze and Guattari), caused by the feeling of ‘doom and gloom’ negative sentiments (‘affect aliens and killjoys’, Ahmed), speculative analytics (‘staying with the trouble’, Haraway) and, ultimately, based on those accounts, to attempt to answer the question of how we could imagine a brighter tomorrow (ethics of care, Grosz, Braidotti).

Doctoral Dissertation, British and American Literature, 2010

"Cybercultural Ecologies examines the interpenetrating relationships between nature, virtuality, and narrative. Operating at the interface between ecocriticism and cyberculture, its approach is narrative-based and thematic, focusing on texts (literary, cinematic, and new media) which depict varying conceptions of technology, virtuality, and their effects. Understanding these effects is ecologically crucial, because technovirtual interfaces profoundly alter one’s experience of nature, corporeality, and relationships. Even the most basic sense of what counts as an environment in the first place depends on the interfaces one uses. The Introduction examines the ambiguities surrounding the terms of its own investigation: cyberculture, ecology, interface, nature, virtuality. Drawing from Jacques Derrida and Marshall McLuhan, it responds to the “interface anxiety” evinced by environmental writers and ecocritics by arguing that nostalgia for an “authentic,” supplement-free mode of “contact” is itself a pastoral fiction. Chapter I examines virtuality’s relationship with nature in both virtual reality and mixed reality paradigms, beginning with nineteenth-century decadence and aestheticism — Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884) and Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890)—before moving to Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), Gibson’s Spook Country (2007), and Vinge’s Synthetic Serendipity (2004). Chapter II questions the attempt to evade virtuality and machinery in order to reclaim “unmediated contact” through the “natural” body in Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Chapter III looks at the liberation offered by the virtual body, as well as its liabilities, in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). Chapter IV scrutinizes the authenticity of virtual relationships in Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel (1940) and Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005). Chapter V inquires into how a virtual sense of place is evoked in Dickens’ mid-nineteenth century railway sketches and in 21st-century digital interactive narratives. The Conclusion examines the film Avatar (2009) and explores the possibilities (and problems) that arise in attempting to make audiences “see” with ecological vision through the lenses of virtuality."

Acta Academica, 2018

This article advances that through incorporating registers of affect, environmental cinema might better approximate its socially and ecologically transformative goals. A film in which this has been attempted is Fisher Stevens's Before the Flood (2016), and it is contended here that for this reason the film holds promise despite the weakness of some of its proposed solutions to climate deterioration. An analysis of the film is offered, during which certain of Julie Doyle's, Nathan Farrell's and Michael Goodman's reservations about Before the Flood are countered, drawing particularly on Anton Van der Hoven and Jill Arnott's arguments in favour of affective cinema. Indeed, a pro-affective film-making approach finds theoretical support in the perspectives of materialist ecological feminists and African philosophers on the role of affect and emotion in being fully human. The article concludes that affect should be recuperated and strategically included within cultural products and interactions, particularly if these aim to engender significant socio-cultural change.