Rhetoric in a Nut: Sor Juana’s “Villancico VII”
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Abstract
In the time of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, rhetoric was part of the school curriculum in middle and high school. Sor Juana self-taught the subjects of the curriculum and she educate herself in that discipline, according to what she states in her Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz. Sor Juana’s work has as background the knowledge and application of rhetoric. Some works, such as the Respuesta, clearly have a rhetorical purpose, but only in “Villancico VII” do we find one of the greatest praises that have been made to rhetoric, not only when portraying the Virgin Mary, considered only inferior to the Holy Trinidad, the teacher par excellence, but by representing her as the very embodiment of rhetoric. The interpretation of this piece shows that the author conceived rhetoric as a practical and creative discipline, rather than theoretical and speculative one. Its orientation is the order of discourse and not what is now called rhetorical operations. In this paper, in addition to underlining the importance of rhetoric in “Villancico VII”, I refer to some characteristics of that literary genre; finally, I make a description of the parts of that composition, presenting in the course a hypothesis about the sources from which Sor Juana obtained her conceptions about rhetoric.
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