Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ed. by Emilie L. Bergmann, Stacey Schlau (review)

118 REVIEWS ! ! ! ! ! que logra crear un estudio y comentario excepcional sobre la ficción cervantina. José Escobar College of Charleston Bergmann, Emilie L. and Stacey Schlau, eds. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2007. Paperback, 312 pp. ISBN 978-0-87352-816-0. To embark on the project of compiling an anthology of essays on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is no easy task. Volumes of scholarly work have been written on the Tenth Muse and her most outstanding works. The Primero Sueño, the Respuesta, her famous redondilla “Hombres necios,” as well as many of her philosophical and courtly-love sonnets have been the object of unremitting critical attention. Yet within this densely-populated field of Sor Juana criticism, editors Emilie L. Bergmann and Stacey Schlau have met the challenge of clearing a new bright spot with this very good volume of essays. As part of the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature, the collection is oriented towards the effective teaching of the life and works of the Mexican nun to twenty-first century undergraduate students at U.S. universities. The first part of the volume, entitled “Materials,” provides instructors with useful overviews of the editions of Sor Juana’s work in Spanish and its translations into English. “The Instructor’s Library” offers an essential bibliography as well as audiovisual and electronic resources geared to new generations of students whose way of acquiring and processing knowledge is greatly—and inevitably— impacted by computer technology. The second and most extensive part of the volume is composed of twenty-seven short essays divided into four sections. The editors’ introduction laying out the rationale for the organization of this part and the topical distribution of its material helps the instructor identify the most important debates around Sor Juana’s work during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and to acquaint him or her with RESEÑAS 119 ! ! ! ! ! some new directions in the scholarship. The first section of this second part provides a background overview of gender, history, politics, and even religion in seventeenth-century colonial Mexico that serves the instructor as a port of entry to situate and contextualize Sor Juana’s work. The editors are careful to warn instructors that despite their efforts in distributing the essays under topical sections that are pedagogically-friendly, other conceptual categories could be used to frame them. I would also add that because of their interdisciplinary potential many of the essays could appear in more than one of the sections in which they are grouped. A good case in point is Stephanie Merrim’s essay in this first section about backgrounds. In this piece, Merrim widens the canon of Sor Juana’s Mexican writings by exploring her involvement with the Mexican archive and with Creole and Spanish writers in New Spain. The essay overlaps with the topics of the second section that focus on Sor Juana as a baroque writer and as a gendered colonial Latin American subject. The same could be said about essays treating Sor Juana from a transatlantic perspective like that of Yolanda San Miguel in the first section, and those of Lisa Rabin, Lisa Vollendorf, and Tamara Harvey appearing in the second. Harvey’s is an especially lucid essay that shows that the frequent characterization of learned women as exceptional harks back to Sappho, thus betraying claims to lonesome singularities. Recognizing her intellectual debt to Electa Arenal, Nina Scott, and Stephanie Merrim, Harvey urges instructors not to restrict themselves to the rhetoric of exceptional status in teaching Sor Juana, but rather to encourage students to ponder the implications of the common themes and formal strategies of early modern women writers across the Atlantic and the Americas and to regard them as subjects of knowledge in the arts, and sciences, and as producers of various forms of literature. When this happens, Sor Juana is no longer the isolated, proto-feminist rara avis of New Spain, but one of many early modern women whose status as published writers compelled them to defend their voices in strikingly similar, if not unconventional ways. The third section of...