Gutiérrez, Juan María (1809–1878)

Juan María Gutiérrez (May 6, 1809–February 26, 1878), Argentina's first literary critic, studied at the University of Buenos Aires, where he obtained a degree intopographical engineering. Prominent in the New Argentine Generation movement of 1837, he was briefly arrested and then forced into exile by the régime of Juan Manuel de Rosas. In Montevideo from 1838 to 1843, he resided in Chile from 1844 to 1852. There, in addition to becoming the first director of Chile's Naval Academy (1846–1852), he published the first anthology of Latin American poetry, La América poética (1847), and Pedro de Oña's colonial epic of 1596, El Arauco domado (1848; The Tamed Araucan). In 1852 he became a member of the Constitutional Convention that drafted Argentina's 1853 Constitution, whose text he wrote (basing himself on J. B. Alberdi's blueprint, Las Bases y puntos de partida para organizacion política de la República Argentina [1852; Bases and Starting Points for the Political Organization of the Argentine Republic]). Minister of foreign affairs of the Argentine Confederation from 1854 to 1858, he abandoned active politics in 1861 after being appointed rector of Buenos Aires University (1861–1874).

This was the most active period of his career as critic and literary historian. His most important works, in addition to those mentioned, were: Origen y desarrollo de la enseñanza pública superior en Buenos Aires (1868; Origin and Development of Superior Public Education in Buenos Aires), Juan Cruz Varela (1874), the edition of Esteban Echeverría's Obras completas (1870–1874; Complete Works, 5 vols.), and the two posthumous compilations of newspaper articles, Cartas de un porteño (1926; Letter of a Buenosairean) and Escritores coloniales americanos (1957; American Colonial Writers). He was co-editor (with Andrés Lamas and Vicente Fidel López) of La Revista del Río de la Plata (1871–1877; Journal of the Río de la Plata), the most prestigious Argentine literary journal of the 1870s. As a critic, he sought to construct, in an anticolonialist vein, a genealogy of American literature exclusive of Spain and its literary tradition. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he considered indigenous literary works, such as Netzahual-cóyotol's poetry, a legitimate part of Latin America's literary heritage.

See alsoLiterature: Spanish America; Netzahualcóyotl.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Morales, Ernesto. Don Juan María Gutiérrez. Buenos Aires: Editorial El Ateneo, 1937.

Myers, Jorge, "Una genealogía para el parricidio: Juan María Gutiérrez y la construcción de una tradición literaria." Entrepasados 3, no. 4-5 (October 1993): 65-88.

Sarlo, Beatriz. Juan María Gutiérrez: Historiador y crítico de nuestra literatura. Buenos Aires: Editorial Escuela, 1967.

                                            Jorge Myers