Ser y sentir con la naturaleza: La ecopoesía de Antonio Esteban Agüero

Abstract

Affective ecocriticism emerges from the study of emotions and affects in connection with the environment and literature. In addition, through literature, Ecopoetics opens up the possibility to establish bonds between poetry and ecology. In Latin America, for example, we often find poetry written more than a century ago that displays powerful activism and that protects the natural environment within a social context where pro-environmental discourses or ecological awareness were not common in the cultural sphere. This is the case of the great Argentinian poet Antonio Esteban Agüero. From the northeastern end of the province of San Luis, in the city of Villa de Merlo, his voice helps identify the experiences and customs of that locality as rooted in the land, its vegetation and its fauna. Our work addresses the collection Un hombre dice su pequeño país from the perspective of affective ecocriticism in general and ecopoetics, in particular. The following questions will guide this study: What emotions are identified in the poems of the corpus? How are biophilia and topophilia represented in the poems analyzed? What connection is established between biophilia/topophilia and place attachment ? In what ways do the various elements of the Puntano landscape exercise agency? And how does Agüero textualize the emotions in the poems studied?