La prudencia de Cortés: teoría política y práctica retórica en la Historia de la conquista de México de Antonio de Solís
The Historia de la conquista de México, published by Antonio de Solís in 1684, and later extensively reissued and translated, has been praised for the ‘elegance’ and ‘sweetness’ of its style. From very early on these qualities made the Historia to be read as a prose model worthy of imitation. Different scholars have studied Solís's sources and the way he manipulated them on the one hand, and, on the other, the extent of the reliability of his account. However, very little has been said about the actual writing practices of the Historia in the context of contemporary historiographical theories, or the author's own ideas about history or politics. This paper analyzes how some of these rhetorical techniques (I particularly focus on the use of oratio figurata, sententia, and epiphoneme) gave shape to Solís's political ideas, in particular the concept of prudence.
Invention and Method: Two Rhetorical Treatises from the Hermogenic Corpus
This volume contains the Greek text, textual apparatus, and first published English translation of two treatises on rhetoric, with introductory material and notes. Once attributed to Hermogenes of Tarsus, these treatises are now believed to be by unknown authors writing in the second or third century C.E. or later. The first treatise, entitled "On Invention", is a handbook for students providing formulas to aid them in the composition of declamations on assigned themes. The second treatise, "On the Method of Forcefulness", discusses prose style with special attention to figures of speech. Extensive notes interpret the often-difficult content and relate it to other writing on rhetoric. The Greek text is that of Hugo Rabe (1913).
The Calderonian Sources of El divino Narciso by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
El divino Narciso is crucial for Pfandl's Freudian interpretation of the life and works of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz: one surmises, in fact, that this play is what led him in the first place to suspect the existence of a narcissistic neurosis. In seeing it as a disconcerting work he was in fact doing more justice to it than earlier critics had done, who seeing nothing peculiar in the allegory saw no reason to explain it. Chavez noted a certain incoherence in the auto, but attributed this not to a disparity between theme and allegory but to the overflowing of lyrical feeling; he took the auto, in fact, to be clear evidence of the equilibrio moral that he considered to be Sor Juana's most marked characteristic). Vossler, more sensitive to the poetry, had begged the question by describing it as possessing a charmingly feminine eroticism). Pfandl, on the other hand, more sensitive to the complexity of the allegory, saw the auto as authentic poetry of the unconscious, in which Sor Juana identified herself with Narcissus and invented an interpretation of the myth that enabled her to seek release from her problem. Her narcissicism was the unconfessed guilt of a morbid pride and egotism. She splits herself into the two main female characters: Echo, rejected by Narcissus, is the Devil, and represents the Satanic element in her character, the dangerous life of the unconscious which is hard to control; la Naturaleza Humana, wooed by Narcissus in the love for his own image, represents Sor Juana's self-love, purified and sublimated in the Divine Redeemer who expiates her sin. The justification for such an interpretation is found by Pfandl in the fact that the auto has two very serious literary defects. First, the dominant