José Enrique Rodó

José Enrique Rodó Piñeyro ( born July 15, 1871 in Montevideo, † May 1, 1917 in Palermo, Italy) was an Uruguayan essayist.

Life

José Enrique Rodó was born in 1871 in a middle class family. Early on, he dealt with the letter. From 1895 he published poems and articles in newspapers. Although he never completed a university degree, the famous author was at the Universidad de Montevideo ( today Universidad de la República ) in 1898 appointed professor of literature. In 1900 he published his major work, Ariel. Rodó joined the Liberal party Partido Colorado and was from 1902 to 1905 and from 1908 to 1912 one of its representatives as a city councilor in Montevideo. In his later years he made many trips to Europe. He died in 1917 in a Sicilian hotel.

Work

In his essay Ariel Rodó warns in a lyrical way before ascending utilitarianism, which is gaining importance due to the rise of the United States of America after the end of the Spanish-American War. It shows in his essay, which established at the beginning of the 20th century for large resonance within the Hispanic Society, on the difference between Latin America and Anglo America.

Rodos sources were Shakespeare's The Tempest, from which he took the characters Prospero, Ariel and Caliban, and Caliban philosophical drama by Ernest Renan. Caliban embodied for Rodó the materialistic and utilitarian spirit which he implicitly of modern civilization and the United States explicitly attributed, was therefore made ​​against him by some critics, the accusation of anti-Americanism and a Manichean world view. Ariel on the other hand, the altruist and esthete, was presented as a model for Latin America.