In the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at UNNC, we have a great many research-active academics who lecture about creative topics from all around the world. One of our schools – the School of International Communications – has three professors who have all published books in the past year: Associate Professor Dr. Mary J. Ainslie, Assistant Professor Dr. Celia Lam and Assistant Professor Dr. Wyatt Moss Wellington. We caught up with Wyatt to ask him about his research and his future plans.
Dr. Wyatt Moss-Wellington
Please tell us about your new books!
Narrative Humanism is a book that attempts to make kindness and generous thinking toward others central to film and narrative theory. It carves a space in philosophy for a definition of humanism that refers specifically to storytelling practices, describing both what we mean when we call a story “humanistic,” and how we can perform humanistic readings of narrative texts. It uses a consilience of resources from cognitive science, anthropology, evolutionary biology and traditional hermeneutics to make each of its cases.
ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze is the first collection of scholarly essays on Spike Jonze, director of the films Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), Where the Wild Things Are (2009), and Her (2013), as well as many short films and music videos. I co-edited this volume with Kim Wilkins.
What inspired you to write about this topic?
In the humanities, I feel that many of us have been trained extraordinarily well to point out problems in human communication and interaction, and yet we are not so good at investigating those things that encourage us to be kinder to one another – the impetus for writing Narrative Humanism was, in part, frustration with this lack of forward-looking ethical focus in film and narrative theory. I also realised at some point that a lot of the films I was enjoying from the 2000s onward were being described as “humanistic” dramas in a variety of literature, so I wanted to investigate what that term meant to the people who were using it. I take as a primary case study what I call the “suburban ensemble” cycle of dramedy films that emerged in the new millennium, such as Little Miss Sunshine and The Kids Are All Right, which often get described as humanistic.
Regarding Spike Jonze, some time back Kim and I noted that we had a lot of overlap in our research interests and we’d been meaning to find a project to work on together – we were also thinking of an edited collection on Richard Linklater at one point, but I feel our work intersected most compellingly over Jonze’s films. So that’s how that project got started!
What are your future research plans now?
Well, I’m plugging away at refining all of these notions of narrative and media “ethics” that keep coming up. Expect more on media ethics soon. I’d like to record another album too, which means finding time for music in my life… I’ll let you know how that goes. Also, sparkling wine and cuddles. That’s what’s next for me: celebrating and sparkling wine and cuddles.
Finally, what is your advice to students who would like to study and research in your topic?
There is nothing better than being granted a space of time in your life to deeply consider the things that really matter to you, whether it be the place of media or storytelling in our lives, how we affect one another through our mediated communications, a particular genre or phenomenon or filmmaker or artist, or just the broader questions that undergird all of these: what the heck are we doing here, how ought we behave? That opportunity is a blessing; take it and have some fun.