Bill Kroeger

I use cross-genre research to examine how authors project diverse forms of agency and responsibility onto readers, as they portray different modes of ecological experience, from organic farming, permaculture, and interspecies coadaptation to exploitative resource extraction. For example, I work with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s hybrid genre of botanical science, indigenous narratives, and stories of personal experience. Considering examples of fiction, poetry, film, and literary non-fiction, I trace their different calls to ecological conscience and the kinds of ecological agency afforded by each genre's rhetorical engagement.