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Sounds and Silences in the Baroque Labyrinth: Teaching Góngora and Sor Juana

I . Nuts and Bolts; Labyrinths and Threads What lured me irresistibly into studying sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Spanish literature was an undergraduate professor’s claim that what mattered in Golden Age literature was what was written between the lines. At the time, I imagined elusive meanings encoded by the author and decipherable through some canny detective work, as if part of the work were written in invisible ink and only required a candle flame or a certain chemical to reveal its secrets. What Elias L. Rivers’s graduate seminars at Johns Hopkins revealed was a far richer and more elusive process of reading for multiple, often competing, meanings in baroque poetry. The experience of collaborative reading of poetry, a process that at times can be figured as unfolding and at other times navigating a a labyrinth while holding several threads leading in different directions, has inspired my teaching. Most students, however, cannot be expected to welcome the comparison of their coursework with losing their bearings in a labyrinth, no matter how seductive the concept was for me as an undergraduate. Undergraduate courses, particularly surveys, require clear signposts in the syllabus to enable students to make the most of their limited preparation time. I devote class time to focusing on specific poems and connections among poems, to help students learn to perceive networks of interwoven meanings in poetic language. Since undergraduates have become acquainted with Gongora’s sonnet “Mientras por competir con tu cabello” and Sor Juana’s “Este, que ves, engano colorido” in the introduction to literary analysis that is a prerequisite for upper-division courses, I have greater freedom in choosing other sonnets to demonstrate approaches to these poets’ work.