Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis Through Art and Media provides an extensive understanding of the climate crisis as it is represented in a number of medial forms, including scientific reports, popular science, graphic novels, documentaries, websites, feature films, and advertising. Theoretically, this is the first book that combines two important theories from the humanities: ecocriticism and intermedial studies. The book carefully develops Intermedial Ecocriticism as a method of investigating how climate crisis is represented and communicated through diverse media types. The chapters each include a comparative analysis of two or three specific media products and how they mediate the climate crisis.
Jorgen Bruhn is professor of comparative literature at Linnaeus University. Niklas Salmose is professor of English literature at Linnaeus University.
Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Intermedial Studies Chapter 2: Intermedial Ecocriticism Chapter 3: From Climate Science to Agency? Chapter 4: Between Raw Data, or Looking 'Out of your Window'; Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science Chapter 5: Future Food Cultures Chapter 6: Roads to Ecological Agency Afterword Appendix Bibliography
All too often overlooked in the reports on recent alarms about climate change is more thoughtful attention to how these alarms get dispersed through scientific papers, news reports, fictional stories, films, graphic novels, and videogames. Arguing that different media carry the potential to engage audiences in vitally different ways, Jorgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose present a powerful case for giving experts in media and intermediality a seat at the table of Environmental Humanities. Communication scholars, media analysts, and other humanists tired of standing restlessly on the sidelines as the world burns will welcome the results of their research and their invitation to consider new ways of understanding and acting on the latest reports on the climate crisis, and reports yet to come. -- Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware Great specialists in the tricky but crucial issue of intermediality, these authors have also, always-already, been committed to socio-political issues, of which the climate-change is currently the most urgent one. This book is a rare occasion to consider how the allegedly luxury field of the Humanities can seriously contribute to make people re-think their ideas. Art as activating, that is what the world needs. And they argue and demonstrate how that can be done. -- Mieke Bal, co-founder of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) Bringing an intermedial approach to the study of a wide range of ecomedia, Intermedial Ecocriticism adds a much-needed perspective to the larger discourse around representation and reception within the environmental humanities: an explicit interest in the roles of media and mediation. It presents a comprehensive theory and method that allows us to systematically compare different media products representing climate change and other environmental crises without losing sight of their specific affordances and potential ecological agency. -- Alexa Weik von Mossner, author of Affective Ecologies
