Ecocritical and Metamodernist Perspectives in Postmillennial Vegan Documentaries

This paper strives to examine the narratives of veganism in the documentaries Cowspiracy (2014) and Seaspiracy (2021) from ecocritical and metamodernist perspectives to uncover how the narrative of the importance of veganism is framed and to determine whether the metamodernist oscillation is present in these films, i.e., oscillation “between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naivete and knowingness, empathy and apathy” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 5). In addition, the ecocritical perspective is examined in order “to give voice to ‘nature’ that has been silenced” (Rangarajan), with the goal of examining how these cultural texts offer an alternative to the binary of nature vs. culture.