Late in her career, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz seemed surprised to learn that her poetry had been highly praised by some of her Spanish contemporaries. This tension between “dramatic” and “lyrical” readings of Sor Juana’s poetry resembles the one that sometimes emerges when the issue of voice in Shakespeare’s sonnets is engaged, whether overtly or implicitly. The combination of an early modern indeterminacy of literary genre with the enormous range of their voice makes the strict application of either label to Shakespeare’s sonnets at worst pointless, and at best indicative of how strongly they demand, and more often than not elicit a performative commitment from their interpreters prior to critical elucidation; i.e. they provoke the implicit (re)creation of a fiction, say a soliloquy or mental dialogue, heavily charged with the reader’s frame of reference as the inevitable source of the ensuing evaluation — like the one Sor Juana claims her Spanish counterparts employed in her case. It inscribes the collapse of overdetermined representation into an endlessly selfconstructive/ self-destructive act of language.

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México