CARLOS DE SIGUENZA Y GONGORA'S 'PARAYSO OCCIDENTAL': BAROQUE NARRATIVE IN A COLONIAL CONVENT (MEXICO, CRITICISM, SPANISH AMERICAN)

Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora, seventeenth-century historian and mathematician of New Spain, is a much noted but little-studied writer. This dissertation places Siguenza's texts within the historical and aesthetic framework of the Barroco de Indias (Spanish American baroque) and reappraises them in light of contemporary literary theory. Parayso Occidental (1684) serves as primary object for this study because of its unusual theme: the history of the founding of a Mexican convent for impoverished Creole women. Parayso, divided into three books, includes in its text life stories (vidas) and accounts of foundations (relaciones) written by the nuns or their confessors, and edited by Siguenza for inclusion in his history.;Parayso Occidental, combining objective historia with subjective vida, contains a polyphony of narrative voices characteristic of the Barroco de Indias in all its complexity and excess. This dissertation combines post-Structuralist and feminist approaches in order to read such a heterogeneous text and its narrative strategies. To meet the demands of history for truth, Siguenza includes episodes relating the nuns' mystical visions, but his models come from litera- ture, especially from Cervantes and the picaresque. The models for the nuns' own texts, however, are those of Santa Teresa de Jesus and other inspired women, whose writing combines the linear time of the chronicle with the extra-subjective time of transport and ecstasy. Such feminine texts overflow the boundaries of traditional history and must be contained by inscribing them within the spatial limits of the convent. Ultimately, it is the incorporation of such "women's time" into this history that changes it and is responsible for the baroque text we read today.;Demonstrating the preoccupation of Siguenza's texts to be history and the recording of an American past through European rhetorical forms, the dissertation shows how the metaphor of a western Paradise is utilized to describe a New World convent. By placing the cloister within the context of Mexican history, its foun- ding becomes analogous to the conquest of America. The battle against sin waged inside convent walls echoes that of Christianity against paganism. In the text, as history incorporates the writing of women, another dynamic is revealed: that of the discourses of history and literature in an oscillating pattern constituting the text of a baroque history.