Beatriz Sarlo - Böcker

In what Beatriz Sarlo calls six "episodes," ranging from the proto–science fiction of Horacio Quiroga and the apocalyptic urban surrealism of Roberto Arlt through the development of mass media, tales of inventors and inventions, and an entertaining tour of "weird science" and medical quackery, The Technical Imagination examines how technology entered the popular imagination in 1920s and 1930s Argentina. Often wry, but always sympathetic, and dispensing erudition with a light touch, Sarlo shows how the products of modern technology (radio, the telephone and telegraph, movies, and rudimentary forays into television, among other phenomena) announced an unprecedented break with the past while also provoking an ironic recrudescence of age-old superstitions. Although the new technologies helped to shape notions of modernity at all levels of Argentine society, Sarlo focuses particularly on the working-class amateur inventors of Buenos Aires, and on how their inventions—even when they failed, as they frequently did—point to what can be recognized today as the reorganization of an intellectual hierarchy, and thus of an era's, and a culture's, intellectual history.

Jorge Luis Borges is generally acknowledged to be one of the twentieth century's most significant writers. Yet in all the critical debates on his work, the fact that he is Argentinian is rarely discussed, as if his international reputation had somehow cleansed him of nationality. In this brilliant introduction to his work, Sarlo challenges these "universalist" readings, arguing that they leave aside vital aspects of Borges' writing, including his powerful vision of Argentina's past and its traditions, which placed both the writer and his country at the intersection of European and Latin American culture.