ABSTRACT
Sor Juana responds to the Jesuit's criticisms of her growing fame resulting from her works, including the Allegorical Neptune. Jose Pascual Buxo considers the semiotic mechanisms and rhetorical conventions in Mexican colonial literature, in particular its allegorical and emblematic components, moving away from an aesthetic approach. Octavio Paz posits a parallel between Sor Juana's struggle to pursue a life of learning against the censorship imposed by ecclesiastical authorities in seventeenth-century New Spain and that of twentieth-century writers and artists in totalitarian bureaucratic states. In the spirit of Sabat-River's intertextual approach, Pamela Kirk considers that Sor Juana's arch "contains much that is typical of her later writing". Jose M. Gonzalez Garcia situates the Neptune within baroque hermeneutics, comparing its signifying mechanisms, centered on the communicative efficacy of painting, to the emblem book by Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, Idea de un principe politico cristiano.
