Góngora, Sor Juana, and the Baroque

I guess I’m just wondering if/how Luis de Góngora (1561-1627) and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695) register with English-speaking readers, and past experience has taught me that this group knows your literature. There are Penguin Classics editions of his Soledades and her Poems, Protest, and a Dream, and I am a big fan of A.A. Parker's study/translation of Polyphemus and Galatea. His introduction to the poem is so good that it was translated into Spanish for the "canonical" Cátedra edition.

I sort of know both authors' place within the Spanish language literary tradition, but I would really like to know how their work has resonated internationally. Are y’all familiar with these most famous figures of the poetic baroque? What are your thoughts on them/experiences with their works?

Welcome back. I admit to knowing nothing and as far as I recall hearing nothing of the two...maybe saw Gongora's name here and there, not sure.

I only first read significant Gongora last year, when I was in Spain and read the Soledades. Someone who has been on the list forever without having been read, beyond an occassional snipet in an anthology. I've been pushing Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz on my kids for a while, particularly some of her work in The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance, which is a very nice collection of translations. My Spanish is essentially non-existent, but walking around Madrid with a Gongora under your arm gets the english speaker a warm reception: definitely a writer many waiters were ready to get excited about. I'm going to have to look up those Parkers.

I had to read Gongora and Quevedo as a Spanish Lit major in college. They wrote nasty sonnets to one another, filled with arcane Latin allusions. Baroque poetry from that period was overwhelming but very decadent to me. I remember the feeling I got reading it. They were very, how shall I put this, over the top... But amazing, truly amazing.

I know nothing about Gongora, but Sor Juana's letter to Sor Filotea is included in the Norton Anthology of World Literature -- I've run across bits and pieces of her poetry in a variety of anthologies and we have a video about her life in the college library, but as I don't know Spanish, most of her work is beyond my reach.

1> You might want to check out Paul Anderson's Hunger's Brides: A Novel of the Baroque. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is a central figure in this massive historical mystery (1300-plus pages), twelve years in the making. A fair amount of her poetry, I recall, is interspersed throughout the narrative.

For me they're just names, but I look forward to changing that at a future time.

#1

I think you'll find many more echoes of the Spanish baroque closer to the time of activity of the poets--history probably ought to be taken in account. But I can't imagine anyone with a professional interest in literature not having studied, let alone heard, of either Sor Juana or Gongora, even in Anglodom.

>8 LolaWalser: Luckily I don't take a professional interest in where your commas go. Though a mere writer and not a student, professionally, of literature, I feel as if any such comment is directed at me as well. The answer that comes to mind right now is a mixture of the way things really are in the US and the way things really are in the world. Without my autodidactic compass, how many Indian works would I have read? In an actual university I took the basic studies option World History over US History, and it was divided into western and non-western. NW included three textbooks: Africa, China, Japan. The world excluded the Middle East and India and Indonesia...So imagine what literature is limited to. My only consolation is that for every Gongora I miss there is a Sadegh Hedayat I found. But at the same time there are these books that are often on my shelves: Oblomov, Furioso...that I never get to. Finally, I look there to my left and see The Cannibal, by John Hawkes. I've read at least two of his novels, not that one, and I think those who do get their Sor Juana and Gongora may not get their Hawkes.

Yeah, I'm self-defensively with Rick. Self-evidently, the bulk of people with a professional interest in literature dig themselves a tiny burrow ever deeper into knowing-everything-about-nothing land and don't get to learn nothing, let alone something, about everything.

The reading list is infinite, but I am glad I got to these two, even if I've only had a cursory introduction. But, dammit, Rick, I haven't gotten to Hedayat!

But there is something amiss in the English speaking world's lack of more attention to Sor Juana in particular. So much effort has been expended to find and republish and distribute some of the early English and French women writers, yet here is someone who has always been "canonical" as one of earliest major literary figures of the American settlements. And she is almost wholly overlooked north of the Rio Grande.

I am just fucking glad I'm an amateur though. Complain all anyone will, I'm performing above my pay grade.

Rick, unless I directly reference you, you can safely assume my comments are NEVER directed at you.

And since you bring up your autodidactic writerly self, a clarification I'd consider unnecessary: no, indeed, I didn't think of autodidacts of any kind when I mentioned a "professional interest" in literature, nor do I automatically expect writers to be experts on literature, or even well-read. The fact that YOU haven't read or heard of Gongora and Sor Juana does nothing to change my view of the world, see. (Especially having come across your opinions on literature in languages less popular than English...)

Right, academic bias, I admit. So, ARE there any Anglo literary experts around whose academic education missed on the Spanish baroque? To the point that they can't even recall the names of the two poets mentioned, if not reel off their verses in the original? I'd be surprised, but maybe not VERY surprised, what with the constant lamentations of ongoing decline in education and Western civilisation in general.

#10

I didn't think literature is your field, Martin. What have you got to be self-defensive about? I've only read Gongora in high school (when I was already oriented towards science), because that's what the literature curriculum traditionally contained: as many "greats" from world literatures as possible.

I am sure, absolutely sure, there are academic literary types who missed the Spanish baroque. Absolutely positive.

Remember, a lot of these programs isolate English literature from the rest of world. PhDs are given in English Literature, not Literature, for the most part in the States. And I think in many other parts of the english speaking world?

I took almost all my literature courses outside the English Department at my school. Because that Department was insufferable.

But you're about to get me going on a rant...

#13

Fascinating.

fyi, just searched the course catalog for the Harvard English Graduate Program, which cross lists courses that "count" for the PhD for other Departments. No Gongora in any course description. Over a dozen courses listing Joyce in the description.

#15

But is that really surprising for a graduate program in English? Presumably non-English literatures are covered in other departments?

I know students in the US get to choose their curriculum pretty much entirely, but would there really be no obligatory world-lit course, at any level, for an English lit academic?

I looked at Harvard and they have a two language requirement focused on European modern and ancient languages for the PhD but maybe a "pro" here can give a more educated answer. Obviously, it takes more than one course.

>12 LolaWalser: well, I'm a grad student in an English department, and I edit a lot of lit papers, so I guess I'm not a pro per se. There's a one-language requirement for the PhD almost everywhere and a two-language requirement many places, but a language doesn't necessarily imply any real grounding in the literature. Within the department, it varies from year to year and teacher to teacher, but certainly non-English offerings are limited. They've just put up the grad seminars for next year, so let us be empirical:

"Imaging the Other in Eighteenth-Century Britain"

Willia Davenant, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru
John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard, The Indian Queen
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters
John Dennis, Liberty Asserted
Montesquieu, Persian Letters
Robert Rogers, Ponteach: or the Savages of America
Edward Long, The History of Jamaica
James Adair, History of the American Indians
James Cook, Journals
Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life of Gustavus Vassa
Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior of Africa
William Wilberforce, An Appeal to the Religion, Justice, and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire: In Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies
and A Woman of Colour by Anonymous

"South African Theatre"

Todd Matshikiza, King Kong
Lewis Nkosi, The Rhythm of Violence
Athol Fugard John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, The Island
Percy Mtwa, Woza Albert
Have You Seen Zandile?, Gcina Mholphe
So What’s New?, Fatima Dike
Hang In There Nelson, Arthur Maimane
Ubu and the Truth Commission, Jane Taylor
Yael Farber, Mies Julie

"Rhetoric, Technology, and Materiality"

Kenneth Burke, selections
Walter Ong, selections
Barbara Biesecker and John Lucaites, eds., Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics
Joshua Gunn, et al., “Revisiting the Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Studies”
Lisa Keränen, “Concocting Viral Apocalypse: Catastrophic Risk and the Production of Bio(in)security”
Madeleine Akrich, “The Description of Technological Objects”
Dana Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric”
Celeste Condit, “The Materiality of Coding: Rhetoric, Genetics, and the Matter of Life”
Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

"The Livestock That Therefore We Are: Animal Studies and Animal Husbandry in Eighteenth-Century Literature"

Jean Baudrillard, “The Animals, Territory and Metamorphoses”
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible..."
Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am
Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism
Mary Douglas, Missing Persons: A Critique of Personhood in the Social Sciences
Greta Gaard, Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign
Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites
Cary Wolfe, Zoontologies
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Robert Burns, poems
Walter Sott, The Black Dwarf
John Clare, poems
James Hogg, The Shepherd's Guide
James Hogg, Scottish Pastorals
James Hogg, The Brownie of Brodsbeck
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

"David Foster Wallace in Context"

Franz Kafka, The Collected Stories (selections)
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (selections)
A course pack including selections from Soren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and a few others
Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories (selections)
John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse
Selected short stories by Robert Coover and William Gass
David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress
Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories
David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
David Foster Wallace, Oblivion
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (selections)
David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster (selections)
David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not (selections)

"Space and Landscape in Canadian Indigenous Literature"

Joseph Boyden, “Painted Tongue”
Marie Clements, Burning Vision
Marie Clements, The Unnatural and Accidental Women
Marilyn Dumont, “City View” poems
Tomson Highway, The Rez Sisters
Richard Van Camp, “Dogrib Midnight Runners”
Mike Featherstone, Nigel Thrift, and John Urry, eds., Automobilities
Fran Tonkiss, Space, the City and Social Theory
Coursepack of essays by Sara Ahmed, Tim Creswell, Michel de Certeau, Philip Deloria, Michel Foucault, David Theo Goldberg, Akhil Gupta, Henri Lefebvre, Achille Mbembe, Pierre Nora, Brian Thom, and others.

Ugh, you get the idea. Lots of non-English, especially French, theorists; a couple of non-English literary works (I also see Bao Ninh)--it's even more Anglo than I was expecting. On the other hand, Condillac and Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried von Herder figure prominently in my thesis, and I know a PhD student in the department who's writing on Spanish literature (although I don't know why he came here), so I guess it depends.

#Lola,
Don't get me wrong, I threw myself into your car for the insurance--I certainly didn't take your comments personally until I thought about how they apply to me. So no collecting on the insurance.

Martin, you've got to get a job when you get out, and all this time you're spending reading folks like Mishima may not help (unless you're going for that position teaching "postcolonial literature and theory", which is code for, stuff from beyond the self-declared core countries).

I think the thread on Gongora in general and Lola's comment in specific highlights a big problem with the Atlantic axis english speaking countries' literary life. But we got the Salon.

Didn't mean to highlight any problems, and I'll take your word for it anyway, because surely some distinction must be made between the pros and the "masses"--would the average Joe have Donne at his fingertips, or have even heard of, say, Herrick and Crashaw? I think that whenever we're assessing some writer's popularity or fame or notoriety, we're addressing a vanishingly small minority (of readers) anyway.

Martin, it's all utterly out of my purview, but given the topics of the seminars nothing in the selections jumps at me as odd or obviously skewed or something... you?

I almost certainly would have taken the "Imagining the Other in 18th Century Britain", but it does strike me they'll only see the other through British eyes in that course themselves. Wouldn't it be nice to occassionally mix a course like that up with reading some of the literature of those being imagined?

Yeah, all they have to do is read Orientalism and then start reading things by people from other places. If you ask me. The concept of "otherizing" is not that hard to grasp.

ETA: They will soon realize that "otherizing" is something all peoples tend to do. Not that we don't all have our own particular blinders...

18: "The Livestock That Therefore We Are" sounds pretty awesome, I'd definitely take that course...

I suppose I was wondering, more than anything, about the wider impact of the Spanish Baroque because of its far-reaching influence on Spanish language literature. You've got the Spanish "Generación del 27" (Lorca, Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, Alberti, and tangentially Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel) whose name references the tricentennial of Góngora's death and the conference they arranged in his memory. You've also got a lot of Cuban literature that is considered neo-Baroque, especially José Lezama Lima and others like Severo Sarduy and Guillermo Cabrera Infante (and, if you'd like, Carpentier). I know that both Lezama and Sarduy wrote theoretical texts on the Baroque and its place in (Hispanic) American art history, and Lezama goes to great lengths to position the colonial Baroque as the first truly "American" (again, Hispanoamerican) art.

Anyway, I too would think Sor Juana should have gained greater fame and global readership in the last few decades. I'm about to have a go at her "Primero sueño" and "El divino Narciso," so maybe I'll have some more to say about her. I read Góngora's Polifemo y Galatea somewhat recently and have an edition at home that pairs the Spanish-language poetry with English prose translations in the footnotes. The translations are simply word-for-word textual exegeses, and I find them to be frequently hilarious. I'll try and post a stanza or two that particularly amuse me.

Netflix has María Luisa Bemberg's I, the Worst of All, a Sor Juana biopic I've heard good things about. Much to the chagrin of most internet commenters (because I believe it's a very serious, thoughtful film), the tag line for the English release of the movie begins "Lesbian Passion Seething Behind Convent Walls..."

Also, if you're into literary theory/literary studies, Baroque New Worlds has a very, very enticing table of contents.

Well, we did read Orientalism my year, and I'd be surprised if many of the people taking the course this year hadn't read it as undergrads. It's about the hardest thing to avoid in lit departments these days, though Derrida's Animal That Therefore I Am or perhaps Judith Butler might give it a run for money.

20 I'm never going to get a job as an English prof! The market is shockingly bad and getting worse, probably forever. No, I'm happy with the editorial thing for the foreseeable--there's more work there, if I can only finish school. So your point about Mishima still stands. Yrrrg.

And 22, yes, absolutely on all counts. Equiano does fit that bill, although he wrote in English, but yeah, I was saddened by the missed chance to learn something about Ottoman representations of Europe especially. It's a conservative department.

And 21 it was just a copy and paste job really. I guess I was expecting more of a variety than we actually saw. Poor old predictable English.

In re Góngora and Sor Juana, msjohns, yeah, almost total ignorance in this quarter.

When I returned to a local state university fo get my BFA, my minor was Spanish. One of the courses was in Spanish-American litereature, which was conducted in Spanish. We read quite a bit of Sor Juana Ynes de la Cruz & I wrote my term paper on her writings. This was in 1988, I don't know if it is still offered. I still have a book of her poetry, which I bought in Mexico and is in Spanish.

Octavio Paz wrote a very well known book on Sor Juana that might be of interest to the members of the group: Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith.