Sense, Landscape, Stimmung: Eco-Epistemology in the Work of Toni Sala and Víctor Català

Abstract

The central concern of this essay is not to simply delineate the myriad resemblances between Sala and Catala's fiction, though there are many. Instead, I first postulate that Sala's Rodalies, by re-presenting Catala's Solitud from a twenty-first century perspective, produces a double time that demonstrates the breach between the archetypal and historical reality of a key symbol of the Catalan literary and political imaginary: the mountain. Secondly, I put forth that Rodalies artfully portrays how the disorder and fragmentation of a runaway, globalized world implodes what the sociologist Joan Nogue calls a differentiated geography of les emocions. The putative homogenization of a flattened out globalized world is shown in Rodalies to actually be a chaotic mosaic of sights and sounds without the clear demarcations of place featured in Nogue's geographical concept. Borrowing from the Romanticist merging of the aesthetic and the newer terrain of eco-criticism, I will put forth that the hybridization of sensor...