Carducci y Gutiérrez Nájera: dos ejemplos de lectura de Horacio en la tradición clásica del siglo XIX

Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and Giosuè Carducci are two of the most important authors of Mexico and Italy respectively. Both were inspired by the French poetry of their time and shared a literary ideal of definition and construction of their national identity. Among the different ways to do this work, the use of Classical tradition, and specifically in the presence of Horace, allows us to recognize the differences and similarities of the nineteenth-century ideas of both authors.

Armonía y trascendencia en Non Omnis Moriar de Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera

El presente artículo hace un análisis de la composición Non Omnis moriar, del poeta Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, precursor del modernismo mexicano. Tiene como finalidad registrar las estrategias sintáctico - fonológicas y examinar la construcción del discurso retórico en el poema lírico. El poema modernista manifiesta la transfiguración poética del creador a su obra, negando la muerte o fin del artista.

Espectacularidad y género: dandis y actrices en las obras de Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera

El presente trabajo indaga en cómo Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859-1895) configura la imagen de las artistas escénicas y el cronista-dandi. En base a la lectura de sus crónicas, cuentos y novelas cortas que se enfocan en las imágenes de artistas escénicas europeas, el análisis discute cómo las fronteras borrosas entre el yo masculino y los otros femeninos que adopta este mexicano funciona como una estrategia para apropiarse del lugar enunciador de la modernidad, al mismo tiempo que desestabiliza la demarcación entre espectáculo y espectador. El modo en que construye sus seudónimos, un procedimiento con el que Gutiérrez Nájera se apropia de los nombres de personajes teatrales y de las características femeninas como materiales lujosos, muestra de manera explícita la vulnerabilidad de esta demarcación. La perturbación conceptual entre el enunciador y el enunciado de modernidad, el tratamiento de famosas actrices y la adopción de la pose de dandi en sus obras le permiten a Gutiérrez Nájera articular una modernidad importada de las metrópolis y lo colocan en un lugar más moderno que el que ocupan las élites de otros discursos intelectuales y los lectores burgueses en México.

José Emilio Pacheco: lector y antólogo del modernismo

José Emilio Pacheco (1939-2014) devoted part of his essay production to reconstruct the past of letters and, in particular, was interested in the Modernist movement. From two anthological texts: Anthology of Modernism [1884-1921] (1970) and Modernist Poetry. A General Anthology (1982), and a selection of journalistic notes that he published in the Mexican magazine Proceso, Pacheco aimed at broadening the spectrum of Modernist figures and avoiding to keep to a single figure, such as that of the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío. This article reconstructs the dialogues and reciprocities that José Emilio Pacheco traces with the literary tradition of Modernism and that are sustained, on the one hand, in connections between poets, as it is the case of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and José Martí and, on the other hand, in the recovering of poets less well-known by literary criticism, such as Salvador Díaz Mirón.

Three Voices in the Wake of an Earthquake

Like practically every single country, Mexico has had its fair share of pain and trauma. Bloodshed and utter devastation are rife in Mexico’s modern history. To civil wars and —in recent years— drug-related violence, one has to add the destruction and horror caused by earthquakes. The seism that devastated Mexico City on the 19th of September was the most destructive and painful in living memory. As an uncanny coincidence, also on the 19th of September, but in 2017, another earthquake hit the capital. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mexican novelists and poets have written profusely about their country’s long history of seismic destruction. Poet and journalist Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera —who ushered Mexican letters into Modernism— chronicled the earthquake of the 2nd of November 1894. For his part, Juan Rulfo — arguably Mexico’s most important fiction writer of the twentieth century— penned the “The Day of the Earthquake”, included in his collection of short stories The Plain in Flames, published in 1953. Rulfo uses a natural disaster and its toll as a metaphor for the unbridgeable gap between the political elites and the dispossessed. Finally, José Emilio Pacheco published a series of poems on the 1985 earthquake, the aftermath of which was felt not only in terms of human suffering, but also as a watershed event that ultimately resulted in social and political upheaval. An idiosyncratic brand of humour, trenchant criticism, and a sense of the ineffable before the enormity of utter devastation are some of the ways three of Mexico’s best poets and writers have found to cope with catastrophe and trauma.

Análisis de un poema de Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera: La duquesa Job explicada

El futuro periodista, escritor, cirujano y poeta Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera nació en la ciudad de México, en la calle del Esclavo número 2, hoy calle República de Chile número 13, el 22 de diciembre de 1859. Perteneciente a una familia de clase media, fue el primogénito del matrimonio de Manuel Gutiérrez de Salceda Gómez (1818-1889), y María Dolores Nájera Huerta (1831-1895). Lo bautizaron en la Iglesia del Sagrario Metropolitano con los nombres de Manuel Demetrio Francisco de Paula de la Santísima Trinidad Guadalupe Ignacio Antonio Miguel Joaquín, el día 4 de enero de 1860. Sus padrinos fueron el futuro funcionario José Yves Limantour Marquet (1854-1935), político y principal financiero del período conocido como porfiriato, y los tíos del futuro poeta: José Nájera Huerta y María Gertrudis Gutiérrez. Hay que hacer notar que el flamante padrino Limantour contaba escasos cinco años de edad cuando su ahijado fue bautizado.

Representaciones culturales, narraciones y estéticas: La emergencia de las divas en el campo cultural latinoamericano: representaciones artísticas en la crónica modernista

Las crónicas que Rubén Darío publica en la prensa chilena y Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera en la mexicana consolidan, a fines del siglo XIX, a la diva como tópicoliterario. Estas producciones forjan un imaginario que celebra la belleza, la armonía y la exclusividad y que por ello resulta contestatario de la concepción burguesa del arte y de la vida que rige las sociedades latinoamericanas finiseculares. En este artículo, consideramos las representaciones que los modernistas mencionados realizan de Sarah Bernhardt y Adelina Patti para analizar la emergencia del divismo, esto es, una narración donde la hegemonía de la estrella logra desplazar a un segundo plano a la obra interpretada. Contrastaremos este corpus con la crítica teatral que Paul Groussac escribe sobreSarah Bernhardt focalizada en la actriz y sus habilidades para la interpretación.

Existencial Poetics in the 19th Century Latin America

Typically, the origin story of Existentialism has depicted Latin America’s contributions as subsequent and tributary to its European counterpart. Nevertheless, a select few critics have approached this history in Hispanic America from a chronologically inclusive perspective, by calling attention to an Existential Poetics in modernismo. This article expands the borders of Existential Poetics to fashion a Latin American literary imaginary. Given the work already done on Rubén Darío and José Martí, both of whom have been studied independently, my analysis will be collective, favoring philopoetic works by Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Julián del Casal, José Asunción Silva, and João Cruz e Sousa. The purpose of examining Hispanic-American poets in conjunction with a Brazilian is to accentuate the Pan-American quality of this Existentialism avant la lettre. As I will discuss, all these poems deal with a crisis of irrelevance and overtly question being in the world, classic motifs of Existentialism. Together, these poems allow for the synchronized inclusion of Latin American voices to the universal history of Existentialism, an approached not explicitly carried out by most philosophical and literary historiographers.

Irresoluciones en la poesía de Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera

Irresolutions in the Poetry of Manuel Gutiérrez NájeraLiterary Existentialism, due to its contemporaneity, calls for a synchronized analysis in its Hispanic American variant since it is often interpreted from a peripheral perspective. That is to say, to speak of a Hispanic American Existentialism requires an examination of the literary production of the latter period of nineteenth century modernismo. The central idea of this article is to continue documenting the imprint of modernismo in the Existentialism canon by using a poetic voice that addresses the problems of being in the world, in other words, a testament to the axiological breakdown vis-à-vis the symptoms of modernity. In this article, I offer some commentaries on the anthropocentric disposition of a leading figure of Hispanic American poetic modernity, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, focusing on the most impressionistic moments of this epistemological issue. I turn to introspective poems that consider human solitude. This theme, centered on the problem of commitment and the pursuit of purpose in life, is more accurately termed protoexistentialism of the nineteenth century.