Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature: Between Romanticism and Formalism by Joanna Page (review)

Joanna Page's Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature: Between Romanticism and Formalism invokes a wide set of ideas ranging from post-Enlightenment Anglo-European thought to mathematical and scientific concepts. This book showcases the ways in which three contemporary Argentine fiction writers, namely Marcelo Cohen, Guillermo Martínez, and Ricardo Piglia, employ mathematical and scientific discourses such as chaos, entropy, uncertainty, complexity, or incompleteness to challenge the alleged exhaustion of viable paths toward literary creativity or newness, particularly after the dominance of postmodern thought. In light of the usages of science and mathematics in post-1960 British and North American literature, Page argues that Cohen, Martínez, and Piglia make use of the same scientific concepts as their Anglo-European counterparts to demonstrate that such models, concepts, and theories "are put to very different use to defend intellectual activity and to testify to the endless capacity of literature for self-renewal" (2). In so doing, Page also seeks to show that these writers enable an exploration of "key tensions in postmodern thought" (2) and the pervasive presence of Romantic and Formalist notions of newness. To achieve this goal, this highly ambitious book is comprised of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion.

In the introduction, Page overviews the main debates of how science has been understood from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, sweeping from Friedrich Schelling and Romanticism to postmodern thought in authors such as Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and others. Page also shows how specific notions of creativity reappear among postmodernists as part of a Romantic legacy, most notably in Lacoue-Laberthe and Nancy's The Literary Absolute. The author situates her intervention among Latin American literary studies ranging from Roberto González Echeverría's Myth and Archive (1990), J. Andrew Brown's The Test Tube Envy: Science and Power in Argentine Narrative (2005), Gabriella Nouzeilles's Ficciones somáticas: naturalismo, nacionalismo y políticas médicas del cuerpo (Argentina 1880–1910) (2000), and Beatriz Sarlo's La imaginación técnica: sueños modernos de la cultura argentina (1992), although a more sustained engagement with these and other works throughout the book would have been welcome. Page's approximation to uses of scientific and mathematical discourse in recent Argentine fiction diverges from these aforementioned studies given that for Page scientific and mathematical models, concepts, and ideas enable a reading of "a highly self-reflexive approach to fiction-writing" and the on-going exploration of the "creative process of literature itself" (13–14).

The first chapter centers on a discussion of Martínez's La mujer del maestro (1998) and Piglia's Respiración artificial (1980) and argues how both authors contest the exhaustion of literary creativity and offer alternatives to rethink its limits. Page is convincing in her reading of Russian formalists Viktor Shklovsky and Yury Tynyanov, as well as in her engagement with the work of Northrop Frye, Ernst Bloch, and Michel Serres, among others, to argue for ways in which these novels connect with specific Romantic and Formalist concepts to advance notions of literary evolution and creativity. The second chapter invokes concepts from mathematics or science, such as Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems or Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, in relation to close readings of Martínez's Crímenes imperceptibles (2003), Cohen's El testimonio de O'Jaral (1995), and an exploration of shorter fiction and nonfiction texts by Piglia. In so doing, Page suggests alternatives to think about metanarrative, logic, and the experience of reading literature (the detective genre), visual discourse (photography), philosophical subtexts (immanence, transcendence, subjectivity, causality), thermodynamics (entropy), as well as questions related to memory studies and other concepts, although sometimes these are not sufficiently explored or clearly connected to each other. The third chapter alights the presence of mathematical tools in relation to Romantic elements (the solitary creative genius, the Faustian pact, the use of opiates, chaos and order, and irony...