Does climate fiction work? Does it reach beyond the choir, engage readers emotionally, and help persuade them to take action in response to climate change? Check out this ''empirical'' study of #clifi

Does climate fiction work? Does it reach beyond the choir, engage readers emotionally, and help persuade them to take action in response to climate change? Check out this ''empirical'' study of #clifi in @EnvHumanities at

https://tinyurl.com/y8lzrcne

see also

With the advent of “cognitive narratology” in the 1990s (the term seems to have been used first by Manfred Jahn in the 1997 article “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Toward a Cognitive Narratology”), a new trend emerged in textual studies that brought together empirically researched theories of human cognition and the examination of specific kinds of language with an eye toward understanding how the structures of language might influence the thought patterns of audiences. In the contexts of humanitarian and environmental crises, Scott Slovic and Paul Slovic similarly began to apply empirically tested psychological theories concerning sensitivity and insensitivity to information—such as psychic numbing, pseudoinefficacy, and the prominence effect—in their commentaries on communication strategies presented in Numbers and Nerves (2015). Erin James and Alexa Weik von Mossner similarly transferred cognitive theories to the examination of specific works of literature and film in their books The Storyworld Accord (2015) and Affective Ecologies (2017).

In 2018, Weik von Mossner joined Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Wojciech Malecki in coordinating a new “empirical ecocriticism” initiative in the environmental humanities, building on existing work in cognitive narratology and econarratology and also extending the foundational work in environmental rhetoric and communication studies that began in the 1990s. This rapidly evolving branch of ecocriticism is described on the website empiricalecocriticism.com. The central goal of this work, as described on the website, is “to put to empirical test claims made within ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities more generally, about the impact of environmental narratives.” Researchers are currently developing various methodologies—many of them showcased for the first time at a December 2018 workshop hosted by the Rachel Carson Center at the University of Munich, Germany—that combine experimental design from the social sciences and textual analysis and description from the humanities. Recent works in this avant-garde field include such articles as Wojciech Malecki, Boguslaw Pawlowski, Piotr Sorokowski, and Anna Oleszkiewicz’s article “Feeling for Textual Animals: Narrative Empathy Across Species Lines” (November 2018) and Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s “The Influence of Climate Fiction: An Empirical Survey of Readers” (2018).

Given the humanitarian and ecological challenges we face in the world today, the work of social scientists and humanists, artists and activists, has taken on a new urgency. The empirical focus in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities more broadly emerges from this sense of urgency and the hope to offer practical contributions to the perceptual and communication challenges described elsewhere on the Arithmetic of Compassion website.

Works Cited

Hansen, Anders, and Robert Cox, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication. Routledge, 2015.

Herndl, Carl G., and Stuart C. Brown, eds. Green Culture:Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America. University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

Jahn, Manfred. “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Toward a Cognitive Narratology.” Poetics Today 18 (1997): 441-68.

James, Erin. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.

Malecki, Wojciech, Boguslaw Pawlowski, Piotr Sorokowski, and Anna Oleszkiewicz. “Feeling for Textual Animals: Narrative Empathy Across Species Lines.” Poetics (November 2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2018.11.003

Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew. “The Influence of Climate Fiction: An Empirical Survey of Readers.” Environmental Humanities 10.2 (2018).

Slovic, Scott, and Paul Slovic, eds. Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data. Oregon State University Press, 2015.

Slovic, Scott, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication. Routledge, 2019 

Weik von Mossner, Alexa. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Ohio State University Press, 2017.