Sor Juana secondary literature

Fredrick Luciani

Argues that, in a time before the autobiographical genre became formalised, Sor Juana used the Respuesta a Sor Filotea as a way to fashion herself for all posterity. Reinterprets St Paul’s idea of the husband or the veil to her own ends - she presents herself as a living metaphor embodying the idea of the chaste, lettered woman.

Stephanie Merrim

Adds a feminist perspective to Octavio Paz’s reading of Sor Juana’s life, arguing that she wasn’t so much an “intersexual being”, but a woman who reinterpreted the written conventions of the Baroque for her own purposes. Also criticises his dismissal of her “sapphic” poetry as being prose for old ladies, as they cross parochial lines

José Pascual Buxó

Provides alternative narratives to Sor Juana’s widely accepted biography, arguing that the letter may have been a collusion between Sor Juana and Manuel Fernandez for their twin goals, and that she may have chosen to renounce secular studies in 1693 out of admiration for feminine self-sacrifice by figures like St Catharine

Jacqueline C. Nanfito

Argues that the Primero Sueno is carefully constructed by using vertical height to suggest the transcendence of the corporeal realm, and use of the rhetorical device “digressio” to separate outer time from human/inner time, as well as its focus on binary opposites to establish physical parameters

Rosa Perelmuter Pérez

Shows that the Respuesta (and other works) are structured according to Classical Rhetoric, distinguishing her prose from her Gongora-esque poetry. Follows a pattern of of exordio, narración, confirmación and epílogo. Uses “casera familiaridad” and captatio benevolientae

Stephanie Kirk

Shows that Sor Juana capably entered a city of knowledge in New Spain that was constructed principally for men of the clergy, triggering masculine anxieties by inserting herself into conventional forms and debates where women were unwelcome, and revealing how Jesuit orders provided a penetrability to the city’s walls

Nicholas R. Jones

·       Argues that, having been part of a metropolitan city consisting of indigenous, Spanish, Portuguese and West African cultures, Sor Juana is more than a criolla writer – she contributes to our understanding of blackness or afromestizaje

↪ calls this the “Hispanic Black Atlantic”

·       In analysing the villancicos he shows…

↪ presence of the Baroque – Luis de Góngora’s recreation/fetishisation of African phonetics reflected in hers, Baroque language games with ideas of black (shined on by the lord) and white (pure)

↪ the use of the symbol of the Virgen de Guadalupe to communicate the idea of being “black but lovely” – and also thinking subjects of their own social world

·       Definitely overstates the extent to which Sor Juana can be considered a Black writer while downplaying the problematics behind a unilateral recreation of Afromexican culture. Especially because the justification is some bs about the existence of black slave owners, to reconcile the fact that Sor Juana had a mulatta slave