“…Having had the chance to sit together in silence and discuss the experience, students may be open to insights on the nature and value of silence drawn from religious traditions. Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, the 17 th ‐century Mexican nun whose bishop attempted to silence her after she critiqued a sermon, wrote a reply in which she entreats her reader to ‘[h]ear me silent’ (Bokser, ) . She writes that:[A]lthough silence explains much by the emphasis of leaving all unexplained, because it is a negative thing, one must name the silence, so that what it signifies may be understood.…”
Section: Holding the Silencementioning
confidence: 99%
“…According to Bokser, Sor Juana's critique, La respuesta , is possibly the first feminist tract written in the New World (, p. 7).…”
The concept 'silence' has diametrically opposed meanings; it connotes peace and contemplation as well as death and oblivion. Silence can also be considered a practice. There is keeping the rule of silence to still the mind and find inner truth, as well as forcibly silencing in the sense of subjugating another to one's own purposes. The concept of teaching runs the gamut between these extremes, from respectfully leading students to search and discover, to relentlessly bending them to one's own will. This article examines contradictory connotations and practices of silence and teachers' ambivalent perceptions of it in order to conceptualize a positive practice of silence for teacher education.Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise (Proverbs 17: 28).
Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me (Pascal, Pensées, iii.206) The rest is silence. [Hamlet dies] (Hamlet, V.ii.310).Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent (Paul's first letter to Timothy, 1 Timothy 2: 11-12).Whether one is a categorical realist or not, it is difficult to deny that the concepts we use to describe existence (dog, table, existence) are how we make sense of and come to understand our lives. In general philosophical use, a concept is 'that which a person has when he [or she] understands or is able to use some portion of his [or her] language' (Flew, 1979). Flew distinguishes weak criteria for possessing a concept whereby one can only pick out that to which the concept applies, like saying 'sheep' in the presence of one, and stronger criteria requiring more factual knowledge (p. 69), such as a shepherd would possess, or a linguist regarding the etymology of the word 'sheep' and its variants (sheepish, sheep's clothing). Concepts for grouping how we distinguish one thing or phenomenon from another are created and adapted continually to identify new phenomena (computer literacy, post-modernism) or fall into disuse as times change bs_bs_banner
“…Having had the chance to sit together in silence and discuss the experience, students may be open to insights on the nature and value of silence drawn from religious traditions. Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, the 17 th ‐century Mexican nun whose bishop attempted to silence her after she critiqued a sermon, wrote a reply in which she entreats her reader to ‘[h]ear me silent’ (Bokser, ) . She writes that:[A]lthough silence explains much by the emphasis of leaving all unexplained, because it is a negative thing, one must name the silence, so that what it signifies may be understood.…”
Section: Holding the Silencementioning
confidence: 99%
“…According to Bokser, Sor Juana's critique, La respuesta , is possibly the first feminist tract written in the New World (, p. 7).…”
The concept 'silence' has diametrically opposed meanings; it connotes peace and contemplation as well as death and oblivion. Silence can also be considered a practice. There is keeping the rule of silence to still the mind and find inner truth, as well as forcibly silencing in the sense of subjugating another to one's own purposes. The concept of teaching runs the gamut between these extremes, from respectfully leading students to search and discover, to relentlessly bending them to one's own will. This article examines contradictory connotations and practices of silence and teachers' ambivalent perceptions of it in order to conceptualize a positive practice of silence for teacher education.Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise (Proverbs 17: 28).
Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me (Pascal, Pensées, iii.206) The rest is silence. [Hamlet dies] (Hamlet, V.ii.310).Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent (Paul's first letter to Timothy, 1 Timothy 2: 11-12).Whether one is a categorical realist or not, it is difficult to deny that the concepts we use to describe existence (dog, table, existence) are how we make sense of and come to understand our lives. In general philosophical use, a concept is 'that which a person has when he [or she] understands or is able to use some portion of his [or her] language' (Flew, 1979). Flew distinguishes weak criteria for possessing a concept whereby one can only pick out that to which the concept applies, like saying 'sheep' in the presence of one, and stronger criteria requiring more factual knowledge (p. 69), such as a shepherd would possess, or a linguist regarding the etymology of the word 'sheep' and its variants (sheepish, sheep's clothing). Concepts for grouping how we distinguish one thing or phenomenon from another are created and adapted continually to identify new phenomena (computer literacy, post-modernism) or fall into disuse as times change bs_bs_banner
“…Both structuralist theory (Stanley 1990) and complex adaptive systems theory (Saville-Troike 1985; Luhmann and Behnke 1994) offer insights into the roles of silence within narrative and discourse structures. Bokser (2006) distinguishes among complete rhetorics of silence, 5 and translators are aware of the same narrative structures when they work across languages and cultures (Catania 2006). 'Professional' genres often require mastery of the use of silence appropriately and effectively in oral presentations, as the best academics do when they present their research (Rendle-Short 2005), news broadcasters do when they want viewers to recognize and recall important stories just preceding the silence (Lang et al 2003), and those in advertising and public relations do to focus attention or generate certain moods (Olsen 1994).…”
Strikingly, theorizing about digital technologies has led us to recognize many habitual subjects of research as figures against fields that are also worthy of study. Communication, for example, becomes visible only against the field of silence. Silence is critically important for the construction of reality -and the social construction of reality has a complement, the also necessary contemplative construction of reality. Silence is so sensitive and fragile that an inability to achieve it, or to get rid of it, or to correct the wrong kind of silence often provides early indicators of individual, group, communal, and society-wide stresses from information technologies. Indeed, we might treat difficulties with silence as miners treated canaries in coal mines, as early warning signals. The story has already been told that nightingales in London now have to sing so loudly in order to be heard above the ambient noise that the birds are in danger of breaking the noise ordinance law.Surely something has gone awry if nightingales break the law when they sing. Finding ways to protect silence as an arena of personal and social choice is a particularly poignant, evocative, and instructive ethical and policy horizon at this frontier moment for the human species. This article introduces the theory of the contemplative construction of reality, explores what the study of silence tells us about reality construction processes, and outlines a research agenda.
“…Octavio Paz, among others, interpreted the text's driving force as a defence of women's learning: 'Se da cuenta de que la atacan sobre todo por ser mujer y de ahí que su defensa se transforme inmediatamente en una defensa de su sexo' (Paz 1982: 538). More recent studies have expanded their spheres of analysis to include rhetorical aspects of the text (Bokser 2006;Scott 1994;Segura 1994;Ludmer 1991;Merrim 1985), its relationship to the nun's vita (Myers 1990), its list of women of letters (Peraita 2000; Jaffe 1993), and the construction of subaltern subjectivities (Martínez San Miguel 1994). Nonetheless the vast majority of critics still situate the text primarily within the literary and socio-historical context of women's writing and women's access to knowledge.…”
The autobiographical letter from the Mexican nun and poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (1691; henceforth the Respuesta) remains one of the most studied, yet most misunderstood, texts in her extensive body of writings. In November 1690, Fernández de Santa Cruz published, without Sor Juana's permission, a treatise entitled Carta atenagórica (1690), which the Jeronymite wrote in response to a sermon given by the Jesuit Antonio Vieira in 1655 on the question of 'la mayor fineza de Cristo', or the greatest demonstration of Christ's love for mankind. As an introduction to the treatise he appended a pseudonymous letter written in the guise of a nun from Puebla, Sor Filotea de la Cruz, the Carta de Sor Filotea (1690; henceforth the Carta), in which he critiqued Sor Juana's treatise and her commitment to intellectual pursuits. In response, Sor Juana penned the Respuesta, a defence against the accusations the Bishop had levelled against her.As Rosa Perelmuter Pérez has noted, throughout the history of its reception most critics have interpreted the Respuesta as one of the first feminist documents to be written in Spanish America (Perelmuter Pérez 1983: 147). Octavio Paz, among others, interpreted the text's driving force as a defence of women's learning: 'Se da cuenta de que la atacan sobre todo por ser mujer y de ahí que su defensa se transforme inmediatamente en una defensa de su sexo' (Paz 1982: 538). More recent studies have expanded their spheres of analysis to include rhetorical aspects of the text (Bokser 2006;Scott 1994;Segura 1994;Ludmer 1991;Merrim 1985), its relationship to the nun's vita (Myers 1990), its list of women of letters (Peraita 2000; Jaffe 1993), and the construction of subaltern subjectivities (Martínez San Miguel 1994). Nonetheless the vast majority of critics still situate the text primarily within the literary and socio-historical context of women's writing and women's access to knowledge. 1 While its concern with gender is certainly important, this single-minded approach has led commentators to overlook other significant aspects of this compendium of Baroque knowledge. In this essay, I place the exchange in the context of contemporary discourses surrounding knowledge, its acquisition and application. It is within these parameters that I then turn to the question of gender, re-reading both the Carta's and the Respuesta's engagement with women's access to knowledge in seventeenth-century Spanish America through a revaluation of Sor Juana's description of her intellectual method.In order to do this, I examine a significant feature of both the Carta and the Respuesta that remains unexplored by commentators -the accusation against Sor Juana of the sin of curiosity, and her response. Re-reading the Carta and the Respuesta as texts that engage with the word 'curiosity' not only offers a more historically grounded approach to understanding the disagreement that underlies the texts, but also demonstrates how th...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
