Type

Text

Type

Dissertation

Advisor

Charnon-Deutsch, Lou | Vernon, Kathleen | Roncero López, Victoriano | Read, Malcolm | Ollala Real, à ngela.

Date

2015-08-01

Keywords

Literature | feminism, ideology, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, literary criticism, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, transition from feudalism to capitalism | feminism, ideology, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, literary criticism, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, transition from feudalism to capitalism

Department

Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature.

Language

en_US

Source

This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.

Identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77701

Publisher

The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.

Format

application/pdf

Abstract

Many of Sor Juana's recent critics don't hesitate to categorize her work as early feminist writing, depicting her as a subversive visionary, a woman truly ahead of her time. Critical analyses of her work have often tended to emphasize Sor Juana's marginality highlighting her status as an illegitimate child, an unmarried woman dedicated to her studies, a defender of secular notions in a dangerously religious context, and a defender of women in a patriarchal world. The present discussion, however, represents an effort to resist the temptation to overly modernize Sor Juana; instead of understanding her life as an anomaly, this project takes up the task of explaining the productive logic of Sor Juana's writing as a historically anchored phenomenon. Aided by the notion of the radical historicity of textual production as developed by Spanish scholar, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, this project undertakes to explore the specific radical historicity of Sor Juana's work. The aim is to locate her textual production with respect to the contradictory ideologies present in 17th century Spain and New Spain during the period of the transition between feudalism and capitalism. The textual analysis presented examines the intersection of resurgent feudal and emerging bourgeois ideologies in Sor Juana's Respuesta written to the Bishop of Puebla, as well as in a number of her poems, two of her plays and a letter she wrote to her confessor, Núñez de Miranda. Recognizing that women's bodies represent a specific site for the historical struggle between two distinct modes of production, this project also analyzes the ideological extraction of Sor Juana's particular defense of women as she responds to the heightened suppression of women that marked the period. After tracing the specific notion of sexual difference that appears in Sor Juana's texts as well as her ideological integration of the new structure of the public/private split, the analysis concludes that Sor Juana's defense of women was not anomalous to its moment of production and that her standard classification as feminist should be reconsidered. | Many of Sor Juana's recent critics don't hesitate to categorize her work as early feminist writing, depicting her as a subversive visionary, a woman truly ahead of her time. Critical analyses of her work have often tended to emphasize Sor Juana's marginality highlighting her status as an illegitimate child, an unmarried woman dedicated to her studies, a defender of secular notions in a dangerously religious context, and a defender of women in a patriarchal world. The present discussion, however, represents an effort to resist the temptation to overly modernize Sor Juana; instead of understanding her life as an anomaly, this project takes up the task of explaining the productive logic of Sor Juana's writing as a historically anchored phenomenon. Aided by the notion of the radical historicity of textual production as developed by Spanish scholar, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, this project undertakes to explore the specific radical historicity of Sor Juana's work. The aim is to locate her textual production with respect to the contradictory ideologies present in 17th century Spain and New Spain during the period of the transition between feudalism and capitalism. The textual analysis presented examines the intersection of resurgent feudal and emerging bourgeois ideologies in Sor Juana's Respuesta written to the Bishop of Puebla, as well as in a number of her poems, two of her plays and a letter she wrote to her confessor, Núñez de Miranda. Recognizing that women's bodies represent a specific site for the historical struggle between two distinct modes of production, this project also analyzes the ideological extraction of Sor Juana's particular defense of women as she responds to the heightened suppression of women that marked the period. After tracing the specific notion of sexual difference that appears in Sor Juana's texts as well as her ideological integration of the new structure of the public/private split, the analysis concludes that Sor Juana's defense of women was not anomalous to its moment of production and that her standard classification as feminist should be reconsidered. | 296 pages

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