Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Technical Imagination: Argentine Culture's Modern Dreams

The Technical Imagination: Argentine Culture's Modern Dreams

Sarlo, Beatriz
Callahan, Xavier

Hardcover

Series: Writing Science

Technology & EngineeringGeneral World HistorySouth American History

ISBN10: 0804735425
ISBN13: 9780804735421
Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr
Published: Dec 13 2007
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.92 Depth: 8.58
Language: English

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.

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South American History

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