Anthropocene and contemporary imagination in the argentinian field

Abstract

The aim of this article is to propose a brief analysis of the contemporary imaginary of the countryside that permeates the work Fever Dream (2024) by the Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin, in the context of the severe discontinuities (Haraway, 2015) characteristic of the Anthropocene. With this, the article seeks to highlight the relationship between the novel and a rural turn (Saldarriaga-Gutiérrez, 2024) in contemporary Argentine literature, which establishes dialogues between fiction and the reality of environmental collapse. To do so, it is first necessary to outline the formation of the rural trope in Argentine literature from the 19th century onwards, in order to identify how Fever Dream fits into this shift observed in 21st-century Latin American literature. From there, it will be possible to analyze Schweblin's work by focusing on the elements that allow it to communicate with the green-disaster hue of a countryside overtaken by pesticides, where individual and collective apocalypses materialize—such as the spectrality of the protagonist and the suspension of reality typical of the fantastic genre. Finally, the article aims to conclude that works like Schweblin’s are highly relevant in shaping an imaginary of today’s climate crisis—specifically, in this article’s scope, the aftermath of pesticide use—inasmuch as they succeed in signifying the unsignifiable: the fact that the threads of life are breaking in the countryside, a space that is no longer a refuge from the city.