Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana In s de la Cruz

by Emilie L. Bergmann (Editor), Stacey Schlau (Editor)

Overview

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—a witty, intellectually formidable, and prolific author—stands as an icon of women's early writing and of colonial New Spain. Living in the capital city of seventeenth-century Mexico, she was located in the center of her world, but, as a self-taught, illegitimate, Creole woman and as a nun subject to the authority of male religious leaders, she was also socially marginal within that world. Like other early modern women she took up the pen to challenge gendered norms of the time. In style and content her works, which draw on baroque stylistics, classical rhetoric, and the natural sciences, are key documents in the development of Western literature.

Part 1 of this 98th volume in the Approaches to Teaching series evaluates the most useful materials among the wealth of resources available for teaching Sor Juana, reviews Spanish- and English-language editions of her work, highlights audiovisual and electronic resources for teaching, and recommends critical and historical studies of her writings and her period.

The essays in part 2, "Approaches," aim to help teachers navigate with students not only the complex networks of meaning found in Sor Juana's works but also her complicated social world. Contributors discuss gender and religion in colonial society; the element of the baroque in Sor Juana's writing; the variety of ways Sor Juana subverted generic forms to render social criticism; and the relations between her writing and the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780873528160
Publisher:	Modern Language Association
Publication date:	01/01/2007
Series:	Approaches to Teaching World Literature , #98
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Emilie L. Bergmann is professor of Spanish at University of California, Berkeley. She coedited Mirrors and Echoes: Women's Writing in Twentieth-Century Spain (2007) and ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings (1995) and coauthored Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America (1990). She has published on visual culture, gender, sexuality, and the maternal in early modern literature including the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and on twentieth-century Spanish women's writing. Stacey Schlau is professor of Spanish and women's studies at West Chester University. Her books include, authored with Electra Arenal, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (1989); the critical edition, Viva al siglo, muerta al mundo: Obras escogidas de María de san Alberto (1568-1640); and Spanish American Women's Use of the Word: Colonial through Contemporary Narratives (2001). She has published articles on seventeenth- through twentieth-century Spanish and Spanish American women writers, especially of narrative, and is working on a book of women and the Hispanic inquisitions.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Series     ix
Preface to the Volume     xi
Acknowledgments     xiii
Introduction     1
Materials   Emilie L. Bergmann   Stacey Schlau
Editions     9
Spanish Editions     9
English Translations   Carol Maier     9
Editions Used in This Book
The Instructor's Library     14
Audiovisual and Electronic Resources     18
Approaches
Introduction     21
Backgrounds: Gender, Power, and Religion in Colonial Society
Seventeenth-Century New Spain: A Historical Overview   Asuncion Lavrin     28
Sor Juana and Company: Intellectuals and Early Feminists   Electa Arenal     37
Power and Resistance in the Colonial Mexican Convent   Stephanie Kirk     47
Women's Spiritual Lives: The History, Politics, and Culture of Religious Women and Their Institutions in Colonial Society   Jennifer L. Eich     55
Sacred Allusions: Theology in Sor Juana's Work   Grady C. Wray     65
The "Mexican" Sor Juana   Stephanie Merrim     77
Colonial No More: Reading Sor Juana from a Transatlantic Perspective   Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel     86
Across the Atlantic: Sor Juana, La respuesta,and the Hispanic Women's Canon   Lisa Vollendorf     95
Sor Juana as a Baroque Writer: A Colonial Latin American Woman's Ways of Knowing
Gendered Ways of Seeing with Sor Juana: "Situating Knowledge" in New Spain   Catherine M. Bryan     103
Seventeenth-Century Pansapphism: Comparing "Exceptional Women" of the Americas and Europe   Tamara Harvey     112
"Guileful Deception of Sense": Semantic Fields and Sor Juana's Baroque Poetry   Rocio Quispe-Agnoli     119
Sor Juana's Dream: In Search of a Scientific Vision   Elias L. Rivers     127
Spectacles of Power and Figures of Knowledge in Sor Juana's Allegorical Neptune   Veronica Grossi     135
Conventional Genres, Subversive Gestures
Sor Juana in Text and in Performance: Confronting Meaning   Catherine Boyle     144
Sor Juana's Loas: Hybridity in a Historical Context   Gwendolyn Alker     153
The House of Trials and the Trials of Master's-Level Research   Kathryn Joy McKnight     161
Sor Juana's Petrarchan Poetics   Lisa Rabin     170
Sor Juana; or, The Traps of Translation   Daniel P. Hunt     178
The Answer to Sor Filotea: A Rhetorical Approach   Rosa Perelmuter     186
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz: Three Hundred Years of Controversy and Counting   Nina M. Scott     193
The Final Silence of Sor Juana: The Abysmal Remove of Her Closing Night   Geoff Guevara-Geer     201
Teaching Sor Juana in the Twenty-First Century
Sor Juana's Love Poems Addressed to Women   Amanda Powell     209
Visual Technologies as Pedagogical Artifacts: Teaching Sor Juana in a Virtual World   Mariselle Melendez     220
Sor Juana, Food, and the Life of the Mind   John A. Ochoa     229
Musical Settings of Sor Juana's Works and Music in Works of Sor Juana   Mario A. Ortiz     238
Sor Juana, an Official Habit: Twentieth-Century Mexican Culture   Emily Hind     247
Traces of Sor Juana in Contemporary Mexicana and Chicana/Latina Writers   Sara Poot-Herrera     256
Notes on Contributors     265
Survey Participants     271
Works Cited     273
Index of Names     303
Index of Works   Sor Juana     311

Editorial Reviews

"The editors have done a fine job in selecting high-quality contributions that offer specialist and nonspecialist instructors strategic entrance points to the writings of Sor Juana." —Calliope

"These articles are well organized and well written and provide useful teaching strategies to convey the seventeenth-century Sor Juana and her work to twenty-first-century students on both the graduate and undergraduate levels." —Lee A. Daniel, Texas Christian University

From the Publisher