Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Sarah Finley

2020; Auburn University; Volume: 72; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/boc.2020.0002

1944-0928

Alice Brooke,

Early Modern Spanish Literature

Reviewed by: Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Sarah Finley Alice Brooke Sarah Finley. Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. U OF NEBRASKA P, 2019. 252 PP. MUCH ATTENTI ON HAS BEN PAID IN RECENT YEARS to the role of ocular motifs in the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and to their engagement with early modern theories of visual perception. Much less attention, however, has been paid to aural tropes and to the soundscapes that both informed Sor Juana’s viceregal context and are channeled into her works. A few studies have previously attended to the significance of music in Sor Juana’s corpus, including Pamela H. Long’s Sor Juana/Música. How the Décima Musa Composed, Practiced, and Imagined Music (Peter Lang, 2009) and Mario A. Ortiz’s “La musa y el melopeo. Los diálogos transatlánticos entre Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y Pietro Cerone” (Hispanic Review, vol. 75, no. 3, 2007, pp. 243–64). Sarah Finley’s Hearing Voices aims to broaden the scope of such scholarship by approaching Sor Juana’s works through the more comprehensive field of sound studies, both theoretical and practical. As such, the study belongs and contributes to a wider auditory turn in early modern studies that pushes against the dominance of an ocularcentric model of scholarship. The primary purpose of Finley’s study is to demonstrate how attendance to sonority in Sor Juana’s works revises our readings of several of her key texts and extends our understanding of her engagement with central themes such as authority (civil, intellectual, and theological) and agency, with a particular emphasis on their relationship to gender. Furthermore, the book aims to establish Sor Juana’s works as a point of confluence in our understanding of the soundscapes of the early modern world, first by expanding awareness of the theoretical and practical musical influences on her work and second by using her representations of music and music practice to further our knowledge of the acoustical environment of New Spain. The book is structured around six acoustic concepts (harmony, resonance, sound, echo, silence, and coda), each of which is accorded a chapter and explored through a selection of Sor Juana’s works (with the main focus on [End Page 145] loas 374, 380, and 384; redondilla 87; villancicos 220, 251, and 273; romance 8; her auto sacramental, El divino Narciso; the “Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz”; and Primero sueño). Chapter 1 (“Harmony: Order and Authority in Occasional Poems”) investigates how sound imagery in Sor Juana’s occasional poems emphasizes the resonances between civic order and cosmic harmony, while chapter 2 (“Resonance: Intersections of Music and Other Arts”) turns to similar motifs in Sor Juana’s musico-poetic portraits, in both cases arguing that musical imagery is used to emphasize women’s involvement in the political order as well as their capacity for cognition and intellect. Chapter 3 (“Sound: Female Auralities in the Villancicos”) furthers this focus on gender by analyzing Sor Juana’s representation of sonorous female figures, with particular emphasis on the Virgin Mary as a source of musical and cosmic harmony. Chapter 4 (“Echo: Repercussions of Feminine Intellect”) focuses on the presence of aural motifs in Sor Juana’s treatment of the vulnus caecum, particularly through engagement with Athanasius Kircher’s anacamptics—the principles of sound reflection—and emphasizes in particular the significance of sound to early modern understandings of temperament. Chapter 5 (“Silence: Transgressions and Feminine Revoicings”) inverts the attention to sound considered thus far throughout the book to contemplate silence and soundlessness in the “Respuesta” and Primero sueño. Here, Finley draws on contemporary theory to posit silence as a disruptive space that conceals certain voices and sounds, but thereby also points to their veiled presence, thus interrupting the harmony–discord binary she shows to have shaped viceregal representations of civic and gendered harmony and order. In turn, chapter 6 (“Coda: Re-sounding Voices”) rereads the presence of acoustic motifs in Primero sueño as a counterpoint to the masculine...