Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature: Between Romanticism and Formalism

by Joanna Page

Overview

Creativity and Science in Argentine Literature adds new understanding to the growing body of interdisciplinary work on the relationship between literature and science in postmodern culture.

Joanna Page examines how contemporary fiction and literary theory in Argentina consistently employ theories and models from mathematics and science to probe the nature of innovation and evolution in literature. Theories of incompleteness, uncertainty, and chaos are often mobilized in European and North American literary and philosophical texts as metaphors for the inadequacy of our epistemological tools to probe the world’s complexity.

However, in recent Argentine fiction, these generalizations are put to very different uses: to map out the potential for artistic creativity and regeneration in times of crisis. Page focuses on texts by contemporary Argentine writers Ricardo Piglia, Guillermo Mart’nez and Marcelo Cohen, which draw on theories of formal systems, chaos, emergence, and complexity to counter proclamations of the end of philosophy or the exhaustion of literature in the postmodern era.

This book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how newness and creativity have been theorized, tracing often unexpected relationships between thinkers such as Nietzsche, Deleuze, and the Russian Formalists. It is also the first time that a major study in English has been published on the work of Mart’nez, Piglia, or Cohen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781552387320
Publisher:	University of Calgary Press
Publication date:	02/25/2014
Series:	Latin American and Caribbean Studies , #10
Edition description:	1
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Joanna Page is a senior lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema and the co-editor of Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Countering Postmodern Apocalypticism 1

1 The Science of Literary Evolution: Between Romanticism and Formalism 27

A postmodern Prometheus: innovation and tradition in literature / Martínez 28

Non-linearity, topology, turbulence, and other (Formalist) models of literary renewal / Piglia 42

2 Allegories of Reading in an Age of Immanence and Uncertainty 69

Serial polysemia: crimes of logic / Martínez 70

Interpretation and interpretosis in an immanent world / Cohen 81

Literature: the laboratory of the future / Piglia 95

3 Mathematics and Creativity 115

Creative contradictions and the mathematics of postmodern thought / Martínez 116

Post-Romantic principles of creativity in a self-organizing universe / Cohen 133

4 Machines, Metaphors, and Multiplicity: Creativity beyond the Individual 161

Post-Romantic writing machines / Piglia 163

Entropy and metaphor / Cohen 184

Conclusion: Literature and Science, Neither One Culture nor Two 223

Bibliography 245

Notes 259

Index 275

Editorial Reviews

An immensely stimulating and insightful analysis of complex and multi-faceted literary works.

—Hugh Hazelton, University of Toronto Quarterly

It is commendable that Page has taken on a multidisciplinary approach to seek alternatives to think anew creativity's potential beyond the postmodern . . . a welcome engagement with the debates keeping the humanities and sciences apart.

—Juan G. Ramos, MLN

Stimulating . . . an important theoretical reflection on the relationship between science and literature

—Eduoardo Balletta, Journal of Latin American Studies

From the Publisher