“Strange can be quite normal”: How the environmental crisis becomes present in Han Kang's and Samanta Schweblin's “constructively alienating” environmental fiction

Abstract This article presents the concept “constructive alienation” as a response to the oversaturation of apocalyptic environmental fiction that has contributed to deep‐seated desensitization toward the climate crisis, resulting in crisis of imagination (Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable , 2016; Solnit, If you win the popular imagination, you win the game: Why we need new stories on climate, 2023), spiraling into a crisis of futurity (Pratt, Planetary longings , 2022). Turning my attention to a new tendency in environmental fiction emerging in Latin America and East Asia, I argue that constructive alienation works by resensitizing characters to the crisis—and invite readers to be affected as well. This expands the scope of the common trait's of environmental fiction: it is set in the present, rather than in a distant future, and it is intimately connected to realist modes, intertwined with feminist speculations represented through the weirdly horrible (Fisher, The weird and the eerie , 2016). By reading two works from this new tendency in environmental fiction, Han Kang's The Vegetarian and Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream, I investigate how the traditionally negative, unconstructive affect alienation is reworked through weirdly horrible, xenofeminist (Hester, Xenofeminism , 2018), and posthuman feminist (Haraway, Manifestly Haraway, 2016) elements. I conclude that constructive alienation has a surprising, novel potential for representing the environmental crisis; as an unequally distributed, structural crisis that is both familiar and unfamiliar, seen through a disorienting narrative structure.