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영어

This essay delves into the rhetoric of silence in Carta atenagórica (1690) and Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz (1691) of Sor Juana Iné́s de la Cruz. In 1690, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, bishop of Puebla, published without Sor Juana’s permission her critique about Portuguese Jesuit preacher António Vieyra. Using the female pseudonym of Sor Filotea, he also admonished Sor Juana to concentrate on religious rather than secular studies. Sor Juana responded to the bishop of Puebla in 1691 with her magnificent self-defense and defense of all women’s right to knowledge. Throughout the Respuesta, Sor Juana expresses her utmost modesty to Sor Filotea but remains strong in supporting her larger cause. To demonstrate her own space of knowledge as a woman, she tactically uses the rhetoric of silence in masks of subordination and ignorance facing the peril of Inquisition. As a “mute penitent”, her signal of silence serves as a tactic of the weak to express her devious resistance to paternalistic dogma. And she notifies discreet notes about knowledge that can't be defined mere words nor gesture of mysticism. Thus, by the intriguing interplay between saying and not saying, Sor Juana unveils hidden masks created by tension between text and context, between paternalistic church and female intelectual, between scholastic dogma and proto-Enlightenment notion of knowledge.