Post-Pandoran Depression or Na’vi Sympathy: Avatar, Affect, and Audience Reception

Chapters in this book

1. Front Matter i
2. Contents v
3. Bringing Avatar into Focus
4. Avatar as Rorschach 3
5. The Religion and Politics of Avatar 13
6. Avatar: Ecorealism and the Blockbuster Melodrama 23
7. Outer Space Religion and the Ambiguous Nature of Avatar’s Pandora 37
8. Popular Responses
9. Avatar Fandom, Environmentalism, and Nature Religion 61
10. Post-Pandoran Depression or Na’vi Sympathy: Avatar, Affect, and Audience Reception 83
11. Transposing the Conversation into Popular Idiom: The Reaction to Avatar in Hawai‘i 95
12. Watching Avatar from “AvaTar Sands” Land 123
13. Critical, Emotional & Spiritual Reflections
14. Becoming the “Noble Savage”: Nature Religion and the “Other” in Avatar 143
15. The Na’vi as Spiritual Hunters: A Semiotic Exploration 161
16. Calling the Na’vi: Evolutionary Jungian Psychology and Nature Spirits 181
17. Avatar and Artemis: Indigenous Narratives as Neo-Romantic Environmental Ethics 201
18. Spirituality and Resistance: Avatar and Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest 221
19. I See You: Interspecies Empathy and Avatar 241
20. Knowing Pandora in Sound: Acoustemology and Ecomusicological Imagination in Cameron’s Avatar 261
21. Works of Doubt and Leaps of Faith: An Augustinian Challenge to Planetary Resilience 277
22. Epilogue: Truth and Fiction in Avatar’s Cosmogony and Nature Religion 301
23. Afterword: Considering the Legacies of Avatar 337
24. Contributors 353
25. Index 359
26. Environmental Humanities Series 369