?Future Human life on the borders of past civilization: ?The Tamarisk Hunter? (Paolo Bacigalupi) and The Route of the Elephants (Germán Falfán González)

Viena

Conferencia; XXI Conference of ICLA (International Comparative Literature Association) The many languages of comparative literature; 2016

ICLA (International Association of Comparative Literature)

Future Human life on the borders of past civilization: ?The Tamarisk Hunter? (Paolo Bacigalupi) and The Route of the Elephants (Germán Falfán González)The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first have beheld an intensification of the global ecological crisis, which has brought an increasing production of writings or artistic artifacts that explore the nature and the consequences of the said crisis. In most cases there are two main assumptions: humans are responsible, to a large measure, for this general decline of the environment and the prospects are quite bleak. The underlying conjecture is that we are living what has been called the Anthropocene era, understanding that human activity is so significant that is even affecting the earth in its geological make up, which, in turn, alters human communities. The imaginative response to these deep and somber worries are coded in the persistent appearance of the apocalyptic motif in aesthetic works in the most varied forms. They center around different concerns such as: the intensification of global disasters, the break-out of global epidemics, and the exhaustion of natural resources (fossil fuels, water, wood, etc.), among others. ?The Tamarisk Hunter? (2011) by American writer Paolo Bacigalupi and The Route of the Elephants (2014), an Argentinian play written and directed by Germán Falfán González, present one of the possible catastrophes the contemporary ecological crisis may take in the future: the running out of water. This paper explores how the liminal groups that survive the end of water period, in the already mentioned texts, constitute new communities, re-locate on space, lead ?ex-centric? lives on isolated areas. It also examines how the texts code the changes in relationships among human beings and the non-human world and their values (or non-values) to show the consequences that the crossing of boundaries regarding the lack of concern for the environment and environmental justice will bring about.