Science fiction and the critique of modernity from the periphery: A study of selected works by nineteenth century Latin American writers (Amado Nervo, Mexico, Leopoldo Lugones, Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, Argentina)

This dissertation examines the genre of science fiction in Latin American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with emphasis on its role in the critique of modernity and contemporary discourses of science and development. Works by the Mexican writer Amado Nervo and the Argentinians Leopoldo Lugones and Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg are analyzed to reveal how science fiction also responded to the utopian imagination of this period. The theoretical outlines of this critique are presented in the first chapter, which discusses socioeconomic factors relating to the professionalization of modenista writers.; In the second chapter the motif of interstellar voyages is placed in the context of traditional fantastic journeys. The review of both European and Latin American contexts shows that the influence of heterodox movements such as Spiritualism represented a resurgence of messianism as well as the ritualistic aspects provided by esoteric cults. A work of “science fantasy” by Amado Nervo fuses spiritualism with the language of science in a critique of the bourgeois ethos.; The third and fourth chapters examine the influence of evolutionary doctrines. Social antagonism was frequently translated in terms of species difference, in racial discourse as well as Social Darwinist ideology. In Leopoldo Lugones's story “Yzur”, an ironic mode questions the ethical basis of evolutionary doctrines. In the fourth chapter the added dimension of time is introduced to examine social difference. Both chapters incorporate an apocalyptic element which reflects social pessimism and a fin de siècle sensibility.; In the fifth chapter the theme of instrumentalized humanity as related to marginal and predatory subjectivities is examined. Specifically, the theme of artificial women (in the guise of both android and pathological subject) is analyzed to reveal how models of production and medical discourse fueled dark fantasies of mechanical behavior and fears about the effacement of social distance.; The last chapter analyzes the importance of the utopian imagination in the cultural project of modernista writers. This involved a recourse to irony and a questioning of form, as conditioned by the socioeconomic outlook of writers who reflected on the narrative of progress from the vantage point of a region of peripheral development.