Paul Groussac: a Fragmentary Critique of Argentine Authors

Abstract

Although Paul Groussac was suspicious of the quality of Argentine literature, since, like American literature in general, he considered it to be a mere copy of European literature, he did not cease to write about particular authors. Here we propose to gather and analyse his interventions, which are not few, dedicated to three authors: Juan B. Alberdi, Esteban Echeverría and Domingo F. Sarmiento. An exhaustive archival work is carried out, which allows us to recover not only the original versions of articles later collected, with modifications, in a book, but also unpublished works and others that until now had never been studied (an early article dedicated to Alberdi, which Groussac published in 1874 in the Tucuman newspaper La Razón, is included as an appendix). Two elements present in general in Groussac's work –his assessment of the (lack of) originality in American literature; his critical style consisting in pursuing, and sometimes in making coincide, in the same aesthetic judgement, praise and censure– are taken as axes to approach the specific operations he deploys in the reading of each of these three authors of the generation of 1837, to the extent that these recurrent themes run through the particular approaches and determine them.

Keywords

• paul groussac
• crítica literaria
• literatura argentina
• juan b. alberdi
• esteban echeverría
• domingo f. sarmiento