World Famous Comics: Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith
Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith
By: Octavio Paz Publisher: Belknap Press Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Belknap Press Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 564 Publication Date: January 02, 1990
Mexico's leading poet, essayist, and cultural critic writes of a Mexican poet of another time and another world, the world of seventeenth-century New Spain. His subject is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the most striking figure in all of Spanish-American colonial literature and one of the great poets of her age.
Her life reads like a novel. A spirited and precocious girl, one of six illegitimate children, is sent to live with relatives in the capital city. She becomes known for her beauty, wit, and amazing erudition, and is taken into the court as the Vicereine's protégée. For five years she enjoys the pleasures of life at court--then abruptly, at twenty, enters a convent for life. Yet, no recluse, she transforms the convent locutory into a literary and intellectual salon; she amasses an impressive library and collects scientific instruments, reads insatiably, composes poems, and corresponds with literati in Spain. To the consternation of the prelates of the Church, she persists in circulating her poems, redolent more of the court than the cloister. Her plays are performed, volumes of her poetry are published abroad, and her genius begins to be recognized throughout the Hispanic world. Suddenly she surrenders her books, forswears all literary pursuits, and signs in blood a renunciation of secular learning. The rest is silence. She dies two years later, at forty-six.
Octavio Paz has long been intrigued by the enigmas of Sor Juana's personality and career. Why did she become a nun? How could she renounce her lifelong passion for writing and learning? Such questions can be answered only in the context of the world in which she lived. Paz gives a masterly portrayal of the life and culture of New Spain and the political and ideological forces at work in that autocratic, theocratic, male-dominated society, in which the subjugation of women was absolute.
Just as Paz illuminates Sor Juana's life by placing it in its historical setting, so he situates her work in relation to the traditions that nurtured it. With critical authority he singles out the qualities that distinguish her work and mark her uniqueness as a poet. To Paz her writings, like her life, epitomize the struggle of the individual, and in particular the individual woman, for creative fulfillment and self-expression.
Sor Juana--17th century genius This is a balanced, penetrating examination of Sor Juana and the elements that shaped her life. She understood that her passion was the pursuit of knowledge and that she could never fulfill her life's work unless she became a nun. In addition to describing Sor Juana Paz enlightens his readers about the masculine society into which she was born. She was a brave, talented woman who spoke up for what she believed in.
The book that started my love affair with a Mexican nun... Over ten years ago, this book completely changed the course of events in my life for months. Let me explain!: I was wiling away the hours with nothing to do during a 2-week hospital stay in Madrid, going over the notes for my master's thesis about Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, when someone suggested I read this masterpiece about a Baroque Mexican nun to pass the time. At first I thought the suggestion was absurd, hardly a book that would help the hours go by quickly, but I gave the book a chance (the Spanish-language version, of course) and soon met Sor Juana Inés, with whom my only previous encounters had been on a Mexican banknote.
Sor Juana Inés was so far ahead of her time that it would have been a miracle for her NOT to have been persecuted and ejected from the society of her times. Octavio Paz (could anything less be expected from such an author) makes her life even more fascinating than it probably was in reality, as he examines her comings and goings from birth to death, or at least as much as can possibly be known, since his study is probably the most thorough that exists. Sor Juana's biography is amazing and caused me to drop my thesis and change topics entirely. I spent my whole hospital stay engrossed in her tale of love, erudition and ill-fated struggles for equality. I can't shower enough praise on this book, which opened up my appetite for knowing more about her...since then I have read more and more, as well as all of Sor Juana's works, and never get enough. If you want to see what is was like to know that women deserved full equality, to have the intelligence beyond comparison and be forced to use that intelligence with the utmost care so as not to violate strict social norms, and get away with it for years, sor juana will be your heroine, as she should be for so many more women in this world who are unfamiliar with her.
This would be a great text for any hispanic literature, women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, mexican history or a wealth of other courses, or just as a text of interest to women and people in general.
The amazing life of Sor Juana This book by the Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz is a great account of the life of one of the best writers of Hispanic literature. Sor Juana created astonishing poems about life, love, and people. It is a pity that only little is known about the facts of her life. As with Shakespeare, must of what we know about her comes from her literary legacy. Octavio Paz is able to solve some of the mystery that surrounds Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.
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