Ecocriticism and non-modernity in Rosalía de Castro and Ovidio Murguía

A lecture by Carmen Pereira Muro (Texas Tech University) for the Department of Hispanic Studies Research Seminar (in Spanish).
The protagonism of the natural - destabilizing hierarchies – is found in the landscape movement of Spanish Romanticism, of which Ovidio Murguía de Castro (1871-1900), the son of Manuel Murguía and Rosalía de Castro, is a leading figure, who, as I will argue, echoes in his painting the ecopoetic consciousness that we find in his mother's work. The Galician writer Rosalía de Castro (1837-1885) undoes the boundaries between self and nature, not to nurture the anthropocentric self that we often find in male romantic poetry, but to relocate in humble gesture the human subject in a network connecting all natural entities and constructing a landscape fabric in which nature and culture are united. The balance between nature and culture appears threatened by the ominous presence of an extractive modernity that destroys the Galician ecosystem. In the novel landscapes painted by her son Ovidio we can find a similar blurring of boundaries, as the subject is at the same time absent and reconstituted in the purely natural world recreated in the painting.
With this line of research I intend to vindicate the absolute relevance and validity of the cultural manifestations that are emerging in the Iberian periphery in the nineteenth century, reacting to the hierarchies and dichotomies imposed by modernity/the positivist and extractivist nation-state.

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