An eco-affective imagination for the novel (and for the present)

Abstract

In recent years, various scholars from different disciplines have identified and explained that the socioenvironmental crisis currently facing the world has become a permanent condition. Among the new comprehensive tools for both conceptualizing and inhabiting this crisis, the role of the novel is quite a challenge. Also, in recent years, a wide range of contemporary Argentine novels have address, more or less directly, the socio-environmental crisis, ecological collapse, or the threat of the end of the world, alongside others that propose stories in which the main characters change due to their relationship with nature. However, there is another direction I refer to as ecoaffective narrative imagination, which observes a full and reciprocal engagement and a reconfiguration of the self and the environment. Within this framework, I propose reading Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s latest novel, Las niñas del naranjel (2023), which sets the narrative in the past as a condition of ecoaffectivity through the reworking of the story of Catalina de Erauso, the Monja Alférez, and her memoirs via a complex narrative composition that plays with different times and worldviews.