TERRITÓRIO, CORPO E RESISTÊNCIA: O GRITO DA TERRA E O IMAGINÁRIO MATERNO EM DISTÂNCIA DE RESGATE

TERRITORY, BODY AND RESISTANCE: THE CRY OF THE EARTH AND THE MATERNAL IMAGINARY IN DISTÂNCIA DE RESGATE

Abstract

The notion of the Anthropocene has fostered reflections that understand the environment as a political, symbolic, and discursive construction (Pádua, 2022), especially in literary representations of current ecological crises. In this context, the novel Distância de resgate, by Argentinean Samanta Schweblin (2021), presents a narrative that intertwines family drama, psychological terror, and environmental collapse, revealing the fragility of human bonds in the face of a degraded world. This work aims to analyze how the work mobilizes archetypal images and symbols to represent socio-environmental and identity conflicts in Latin American contexts marked by (post)modernization processes. The figure of motherhood, central to the plot, is approached as a structuring metaphor and spokesperson for an environment in agony. The research analyzes the human impact on the planet through the symbolic dimension that relates territory, body and resistance, based in critical approaches to contemporary Latin American literature (Ludmer, 2010; Ette, 2016; Alves, 2022) and on studies of the imaginary (Durand, 2002; Jung, 2014, 2016) from an Anthropological Semiotic perspective (Rodrigues, 2011). It is concluded that the work establishes a sensitive, politicized and symbolic ecocriticism, proposing a reconfiguration of socio-environmental discourses that update and revitalize the human worldview. Thus, Schweblin (2021) offers a literature that not only denounces, but imagines alternative ways of existing and resisting in the Anthropocene.