Poetic Matter and the Virgen de Guadalupe
This event is a part of the 2019-20 Early Modern Latin American and Iberian Studies Workshop Series from the School of International Letters and Cultures.
This talk explores how the lyrics of the seventeenth-century, Mexican, colonial poet Luis de Sandoval Zapata transform different kinds of matter: literary, pictorial, natural and spiritual. Sandoval Zapata's verse, it contends, converges with novohispano festive culture, even as it serves as a subtle vehicle for pondering questions concerning mortality, temporality and the mutable nature of substance. Specifically, his sonnet dedicated to the Virgen de Guadalupe wittily works to resolve these questions. The sonnet is comparable, then, both to visual artifacts and to efforts by Miguel Sánchez, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to represent María. In this manner, lyric distillation, encyclopedic dilation and syncretic iconology inform seventeenth-century Creole thought and expression.
Christopher Johnson is an associate professor of Spanish, German and comparative literature at Arizona State University.