Beyond the Aesthetics and Social Contextualisation of José Hernández’s Martín Fierro: An Unmasking of the Myth of the Literary Creator and the Literary Creation

Abstract

Martín Fierro by José Hernández has enjoyed much success since its publication in 1872: first, as the popular gaucho poem that excited the rural inhabitants of a newly formed Argentina and launched the literary and political career of its author; second, (from 1913 on) as a literary juggernaut that successive generations of Argentine writers have returned to again and again - to find the essence of ‘Argentinity’, to align their literary career with the gaucho poem or to rail against its central position in the nation’s literary landscape. Such has been the reaction to the gaucho poem that many literary commentators and critics have struggled with the question of ‘How do you solve a literary problem like Martín Fierro?’

Pierre Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art provides a critical and complete approach to literary criticism that moves away from the paradigm of literary and social readings of texts that have dominated the discipline. It provides a multi-layered and organic sociological approach to understanding the literary classics of a nation as well as the national literary canons that seem to rise up from literary fields both slowly and spontaneously.

This dissertation endeavours to clarify the principles for the study of literature using the sociological tools and analysis of literary texts and fields espoused by Bourdieu in The Rules of Art in order to apply it to the case study of Hernández’s gaucho poem and the literary field of the Argentine nation during the period of nation formation.