Monday, October 27, 2008

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In Repuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, Sor Juana shows a lot of strength and confidence; “Que solo con la confianza de favorecida y con los valimientos de honrada me puedo atrever a hablar con vuestra grandeza.” Her strength is evident in her rhetoric and her fearlessness to make powerful references. Footnote 14 reads “Get away from me! Take care that you do not see my face again, for on the day you see my face you shall die.” I found this reference to be a direct yet underlying sarcastic mockery of the bishop. She also shows strength in her thirst for knowledge. Her “deseo” was so strong that she even planned to attend university dressed as a boy. Sor Juana believed that you cannot understand something without the knowledge of many other things. She saw tremendous importance in being well rounded intellectually. This meant studying vigorously in many different fields and taking them all seriously. She sought to live a divine life and took knowledge and intelligence to a higher level beyond any scholastic teaching. On page 8 she writes, it is necessary to purge your mind before you can have a true understanding of higher intelligence, but to know everything “que ya se ve que no es fácil, ni aun posible.”

Sor Juana uses heavy religious rhetoric with many references to the bible. She believes that the bible and god are the center of the universe, they see no boundaries and everything else revolves around this center. I found it really interesting that she often repeated the same words. The ones I found she repeated the most were: disgust, temptation, sacred/holy and connect/connection. I am not sure if anyone else noticed this or if it is even worth mentioning but it is just something I observed.

3 comments:

Zaira said...

Si estoy de acuerdo con tu comentario en general. Creo que utiliza mucho la repeticion a lo largo de su carta y creo que es una caracteristica de la escritura barroca (esto seria algo que hay que confirmar con Jon). Tambien me resulta muy interesante su uso de la retorica biblica ya que durante ese tiempo la biblia era un texto que debia ser interpretado literalmente. Creo que Sor Juana reconoce este aspecto de su cultura y lo convierte en su arma de ataque. Tambien me guto ver como le gustaba integrar todas las ciencias (tanto la literatura como la fisica, etc)

Zaira

JennieG said...

I think her strength to use sarcasm is so amazing. She obviously was very secure in herself. I wish that I had the same thirst for knowledge that she had. Her ability to absorb knowledge is amazing too. Knowing Latin by the time she was 10 must have been quite a feat. I didn't notice the repetition of those words exactly but I'm going to watch out for them now.

John (Jung Ho) Park said...

El predominio de las referencias biblicas, alusiones, y citas obscuras es para mi, el aspecto mas dificil para entender exactamente lo que dice en cada parrafo. Hay tanta variedad del modismo, y las notas a pie de las paginas rara veces me ayuden aclarar el pasaje. Respecto a la repeticion: soy como jennie: no he notado eso pero empezare ahora.