Reflexiones sobre una sensibilidad de época. La imaginación científica en la literatura y el periodismo (1896-1910)

Abstract

During the years of transition between nineteenth and twentieth centuries, early scientific fantasies arose in the Río de la Plata; they adopted the form of fantastic short stories and were published, originally, in newspapers and magazines, accompanied in many cases by illustrations. Far from represent mere manifestations of a personal occurrence, these stories were the literary reworking of discussions about science and its achievements, which incorporated both the register of journalism and of vulgarized representations. A distinctive feature of many of these stories, signed by Argentine and Uruguayans writers like E. L. Holmberg, L. Lugones and H. Quiroga, was its plot coincidence with newspaper articles reporting curiosities and “weird cases” of sciences in Caras y Caretas magazine, in the newspapers La Prensa y La Nación, but also in spiritualistic magazines such as Constancia and Philadelphia. These coincidences were not produced in isolation, but, on the contrary, with regular frequency during the passage of centuries. Instead of searching a voluntary intertextuality, we want to analyze how two types of utterances -the literary, the journalistic- arrived to common imaginary perspectives, guided both by the same ‘structure of feeling’.