SOURCE: "Recent Books on (or by) Nobel Laureates," in Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 47, Nos. 1-2, 1993, pp. 121-27.

[In the following excerpt, Lawson detects revisionist tendencies in the thesis of Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith.]

Octavio Paz, the Nobel laureate of 1990, declares that he chose "The Traps of Faith" as the subtitle to his extensive reinterpretation of the life and work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz [Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith] because of the similarity between her ultimate abjuration of her work as artist and intellectual and the abjurations of twentieth-century writers and ideologues who turned into their own severest accusers. Paz cites the virtual complicity of victim with executioner: in the twentieth century that of Bukharin with Vyshinsky, in 1692 to 1694 that of the nun, Sor Juana, with her former and new confessor, Father Antonio Núñes de...