This article argues that major insights from intermedial studies and ecocriticism could be combined in order to produce a productive theoretical and methodological position called Intermedial Ecocriticism. Intermedial Ecocriticism is built upon the simple observation that the production of scientific knowledge concerning the critical ecological condition in the Anthropocene reaches the laymen public by way of non-scientific texts in a number of different media types. This corpus — called ecomedia products — covers everything from popular scientific journalism, museum exhibitions or educational material, to literary climate fiction, visual art projects and documentary film or poetry. The main goal of Intermedial Ecocriticism is to be able to analyze, interpret and compare samples from this extensive and heterogeneous corpus of texts, thus going far beyond the tradition of ecocriticism to focus only on literary and other artistic texts. Thus, the position is meant to offer a humanities contribution to better understand and act upon the pending ecological crisis.
The first part of the article offers a general outline of theory and method of Intermedial Ecocriticism, whereas the second part exemplifies one particular concretization of the position. A videoanimation by Danish artist Per Arnoldi and two contemporary cli-fi novels by Mats Söderlund and Hanna Rut Carlsson are briefly analyzed and compared. The analysis focuses on the questions of narrativity and the representation of the possibility of human agency in the three ecomedia products.