SOURCE: "El sueño: The Baroque Imagination and the Dreamscape," in MLN, Vol. 106, No. 2, March, 1991, pp. 423-31.

In the following essay, Nanfito explores the function of spatial forms and their interrelationships in Cruz's El sueño, asserting that the poem is "a dream of height which enables the reader to transport himself to the domain of the imaginary, to the cosmic realm of the infinite, where one is free to experience the dynamics and depth, the intensity and immediacy of the immanent and the intimate, both features of the fantastic landscape."

The maximization of the spatial dimension figures among the fundamental organizational principles in Sor Juana's poem, El sueño. Her masterful blending of language and aerial imagery has produced a poetic text which transcends the boundaries of time and space through the establishment of relationships—horizontal and vertical—among distinct spatio-temporal realities, and surmounts the temporal barrier...