SOURCE: "Signs of Nature and the Nature of Signs in the Sonnets of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz," in RLA: Romance Languages Annual 1989, Vol. I, edited by Ben Lawton & Anthony Julian Tamburri, Purdue Research Foundation, 1990, pp. 435-39.

In the following essay, Friedman offers a semiotic reading of three sonnets composed by Cruz.

Recent literary theory and criticism perhaps most differ from their precedents by reducing the role of interpretation and expanding the role of self-analysis. One might call this phenomenon a crisis of the critical conscience or an urge for accountability in the analytical process. The prefix meta—as in metacommentary, metacriticism, metatheater, metafiction, metapoetry, metadiegetic narrative, and so forth—is a watchword of contemporary critical sensibility, an identifying sign of the self-conscious approach to literary texts. Deconstruction and the new rhetoric, inspired by structuralism even as they deviate from it, point to the structures and...