Test tube envy

the long version

"Test Tube Envy: Science and Power in Argentine Narrative examines the strategies by which Argentine narrative shapes scientific discourse and through which popular science determines narrative form over 150 years of the country's writing. Beginning with Domingo Sarmiento and Argentina's Generation of 1837 and continuing through the work of Lucio Mansilla, Eugenio Cambaceres, Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sabato, Julio Cortazar, Ricardo Piglia, Angelica Gorodischer, Ana Maria Shua, and Mempo Giardinelli, Test Tube Envy explores the construction and exercise of social power on and through scientific expression. The scientific disciplines considered range from nineteenth-century phrenology and ethnography to twentieth-century chemistry, quantum mechanics, cybernetics, and chaos theory. In so doing, Brown critically engages the work of Foucault and other social and philosophical theorists as he examines the ways in which scientific prestige is manufactured and appropriated on the literary stage."--Jacket.