Peregrinación de Luz del Día: La desilusión de Juan Bautista Alberdi

Abstract

In Peregrinación de Luz del Día (1871), Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810-1884) debaes Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s (1811-1888) dichotomy “civilización-barbarie” and employs irony, through the allegorical voyage of the hermaphroditic “Luz del Día”, to critize the civilizing concept similar to Sarmiento’s found in James Fenimore Cooper’s (1789-1851) Notions of the Americans (1848). In this essay, the “mitología de exclusión” used by literary critic Nicolás Shumway in The Invention of Argentina (1991) to expose Argentina’s foundational fictions, the importance of Alberdi’s literary contributions, and Cooper and Sarmiento’s contrasting political esthetic to that of Alberdi, will be investigated in order to study Alberdi’s dialectical vacillation between political reality and utopian imagination.