Against Moralizing Nature: Latin American Romanticism and the Aporias of the Ecocritical Turn

This article argues that the ecocritical turn in literary criticism reproduces the dualisms it seeks to avoid, especially the contradiction between nature and culture. At the same time, ecocriticism risks the veneration of Nature already practiced and promoted within the Romantic tradition in the global epoch of primitive accumulation during the 19th century. To sustain this argument, this article follows three main steps. In the first place, it establishes a characterization of Romanticism's attitude towards Nature, defining it as the literaturization of Nature, following Abrams' notion of supernatural naturalism and Jean Luc-Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's definition of Romanticism as the literaturization of theory. Second, this article delves into the main figures of new materialism and their influence on contemporary literary criticism, including both the fields of Latin American and English literature. Finally, it shows how the "foundational fictions" from the 19th century represented Nature as a melancholic shelter against the decomposition of the hacienda regime, a representation of divine justice against the empire of money, and a universal expression of racialized harmony against the emergence of the urban multitude. The new veneration of Nature constitutes a late form of Romantic epistemology, producing new forms of humanism and moralizing narratives.