ABSTRACT
According to Rifkin in The Empathic Civilization, the present moment is defined by the race between two logics: the logic of empathy, an innate tendency in humans, and that of entropy, evident in the destruction of the Earth’s biosphere. Rifkin is not alone in prescribing—and/or describing—a change of paradigm as a way out of the current crisis. Rodríguez Mazda declares the advent of a new era, ‘Transmodernity’, a dialectical synthesis of the modern thesis and the Postmodern antithesis, characterized, among other things, by caring, supportive individualism. Fiction, always sensitive to social change, is providing proof of this paradigm shift. Moraru speaks of “a new imagination modality” he labels “cosmodernism”, whose defining trait is an emphasis on relatedness. Cosmodernism is intimately connected with the notion of ecology, understood as “a cultural environment organized around the self’s vital links to an ‘other’ whose radical difference . . . must be entertained as a possibility and cultivated in a world whose dominant thrust seems narcissistic” (2011, 8). This paper analyzes Winton’s 2013 novel Eyre in order to show how modern and Postmodern values overlap and evolve in the course of the work towards a Transmodern sensibility of care and affect.
