Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction

We live in a critical moment in history, often called the 'Anthropocene', that is defined by unprecedented scales of uncertainty. Natalie Dederichs draws on insights from the new materialisms about the entangled nature of planetary existence and combines them with approaches to aesthetics from fields as diverse as reader-response criticism, phenomenology, Gothic and media studies. She introduces a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality as a necessary component of any ecological engagement with fiction that fully embraces literary encounters with the inaccessible and elusive as expressed in uncanny atmospheric reading experiences.

Natalie Dederichs, born in 1992, received her doctorate in Anglophone literatures and cultures at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, where she also worked as a research assistant for the DFG Research Training Group 2291: Gegenwart/Literatur. She recently completed her teacher training at Zentrum für schulpraktische Lehrerausbildung in Düsseldorf. Her research interests include ecocriticism and environmental philosophy, literary theory and education for sustainability.