Abstract

Abstract:

This essay examines embodied sound as locus of female agency in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s reimaginings of Echo and Narcissus in romance 8 and El divino Narciso. I argue that these pieces draw upon the interstices of seeing and hearing as well as voice’s physical and pathetic effects in order to refigure women’s aurality as counterpoint to patriarchal visuality. Debates in acoustics, musica pathetica and the music of the spheres resonate in both works and lend insight into Sor Juana’s engagement with early modern sound culture. Vestiges of Athanasius Kircher’s encyclopedic musical treatises—Musurgia universalis (1650) and Phonurgia nova (1673)—are especially salient, and his influence upon sonority in Sor Juana’s poetic imagination appears greater than previously thought. Broadly, I draw out themes of musical and non-musical sound that previous readings marginalized in order to generate further conversation about aurality in Sor Juana’s canon.

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