Darwinism and Eugenics in literary fantasies of Argentinian thinkers in the early twenty century: Bunge and José Gabriel

Abstract

This work explores the thinker’s role in Argentina near 1900. Specially, it focuses about their anticipatory capacities to receive scientific theories. In this context, this paper analyzes the presence of Social Darwinism and Eugenics in some literary texts, who allowed to their authors to show an ideological position that it was transcendent to the fantastic character of those papers. Thus, the fictional argument conceal, without hidden, the intimal purpose of overlay these scientific theories on vanguardist  view of two intellectuals, who assumed themselves as a headlight of society. So, their reinterpretations involved a didactic task aimed to guide the understanding of complex problems. As expression of this problem, we will discuss here two works published in Buenos Aires that had the goal of polemicize and open questions in a place where the science only saw certainties. They are Viaje a través de la estirpe (1908), of Carlos O. Bunge and Farsa eugenesia (1927), of José Gabriel.