Abstract
Since I was working with narrative, and not poetry as does Braithwaite, I began to seek out environmental insight in narratological forms such as style of narration, narrative temporality and spatialization, focalization, representations of speech and consciousness, and stories embedded within larger frame narratives. The development of a robust study of ecopoetics has facilitated a turn towards issues of literary form within ecocritical scholarship, and a rich debate about the potentials of narrative to shape environmental understanding within the broader umbrella of environmental humanities scholarship has encouraged green-minded literary critics to think more seriously about narrative, its various building blocks, and the effects that this rhetorical mode can have upon readers (and listeners and viewers). Narrative theory has become animated by environmental concerns, whether via discussions of nonhuman narrators, the potentials (and pitfalls) of transspecies narrative empathy, the contours of “Anthropocene” narratives, or the role that narratives and their storyworlds might play in a comprehensive response to climate change. Weik von Mossner’s reading of The Cove foregrounds the film’s representation of animal emotions outside of anthropomorphic traps, thus tasking viewers with imagining what it is like for “characters who neither look like humans nor think or act like them” to experience pain and trauma.