Summary Of Jose Enrique Rodo's Essay Ariel
The United States: A Cautionary Tale
Jose Enrique Rodo’s essay Ariel is a call to the people of Latin America to recognize that they face a great fork in the road of their development. Down one path is the way the United States has taken with its pursuits of material comforts and progress for the sake of progress. Down the other lays the potential Latin America has to be something better than that, an opportunity to not only emulate the great ancient societies of Athens and Rome, but also improve upon them by striving towards a sort of utopia where the soul is nurtured and the highest form of human evolution is searched for. In his essay, Rodo urges the youth to take the United States as a cautionary tale, and instead use Shakespeare’s …show more content…
For example, he appreciates the United States’ effort to educate its citizens – a necessity for a functioning democracy that will truly do the people best. He goes further with this praise, specifically writers like Emerson, Channing, and Poe as well as Boston, which he refers to as a “city of learning and tradition, a glorious pleiad which holds in the intellectual story of our century a universal fame.” (113). Clearly, Rodo is conveying a sense of veneration for this culture that has led to such an emphasis on learning and is a model that he would wish for Latin America to follow. It is this foundation of culture that Rodo appreciates and wishes to follow; he praises the North Americans for their achievements here and hopes that Latin America can also take a portion of these cultural attitudes for itself. Rodo’s problems with North American culture begins then not at its foundational core, but rather the extensions of it, and what the U.S. in particular has evolved into. For example, while he does praise earlier North Americans such as the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, he believes that their works have been have been replaced by the “gray pages of
Jose Enrique Rodo’s essay Ariel is a call to the people of Latin America to recognize that they face a great fork in the road of their development. Down one path is the way the United States has taken with its pursuits of material comforts and progress for the sake of progress. Down the other lays the potential Latin America has to be something better than that, an opportunity to not only emulate the great ancient societies of Athens and Rome, but also improve upon them by striving towards a sort of utopia where the soul is nurtured and the highest form of human evolution is searched for. In his essay, Rodo urges the youth to take the United States as a cautionary tale, and instead use Shakespeare’s …show more content…
For example, he appreciates the United States’ effort to educate its citizens – a necessity for a functioning democracy that will truly do the people best. He goes further with this praise, specifically writers like Emerson, Channing, and Poe as well as Boston, which he refers to as a “city of learning and tradition, a glorious pleiad which holds in the intellectual story of our century a universal fame.” (113). Clearly, Rodo is conveying a sense of veneration for this culture that has led to such an emphasis on learning and is a model that he would wish for Latin America to follow. It is this foundation of culture that Rodo appreciates and wishes to follow; he praises the North Americans for their achievements here and hopes that Latin America can also take a portion of these cultural attitudes for itself. Rodo’s problems with North American culture begins then not at its foundational core, but rather the extensions of it, and what the U.S. in particular has evolved into. For example, while he does praise earlier North Americans such as the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, he believes that their works have been have been replaced by the “gray pages of