Sor Juana, Góngora and Ideologies of Perception

Luis de Góngora’s Polifemo and Soledades and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Primero sueño reflect the increasingly complex, ambiguous relationships between the poetic art of the visual and the science of optics in the seventeenth century. Drawing upon the work of Martin Jay on baroque ocularcentrism and Donna Haraway’s proposal of situated, embodied knowledge, this essay explores both poets’ critique of models of visual perception. Ricardo Padrón’s reading of the mappamundi passage in Soledad primera as a rejection of the imperial gaze suggests a parallel reading of Primero sueño. While Sor Juana’s philosophical approach to the processes of knowledge anticipates modern epistemologies, it responds to her poetic predecessor’s skepticism toward ideologies of empire and the cosmologies that supported it.