Humanities Events
Fall 2024 | The Sor Juana Project: A Reading of Love is the Greater Labyrinth
Love is the Greater Labyrinth is a madcap take on Greek mythology by famous Mexican author Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, now translated into English for the first time by UCLA's Diversifying the Classics.
This is the latest installment of the signature Humanities Event Series and is presented by the Humanities Program in partnership with the Department of Theater + Dance. It is co-sponsored UC San Diego Parents Fund, the Revelle College 60th Anniversary Committee, the UC San Diego Alumni Association, Chicanx and Latinx Studies, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Additional support was provided by UCLA's Diversifying the Classics.
Any views or opinions expressed in this program are solely those of the speaker(s) and/or organizer(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the Office of the Vice Chancellor.
Event Registration
Join the Humanities Program at Revelle College and the Department of Theater + Dance for the sixth installment of the Humanities Event Series, featuring a cast of UC San Diego students and alumni in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's play, Love is the Greater Labyrinth. Free and open to the public.
In Love is the Greater Labyrinth — newly translated UCLA’s Diversifying the Classics — Sor Juana reimagines and transforms the classical myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In Sor Juana’s version, Theseus (Teseo) braves the labyrinth and defeats the monster, but then confronts a greater challenge: an emotional labyrinth created by beautiful princesses, rival lovers, tyrannical kings, and scheming servants.
At the heart of the play, Theseus is torn between his duty to Ariadna, who helped him survive the Minotaur, and his love for her sister, Fedra. Around this central issue, Sor Juana constructs a story designed to delight the audience full of music, masked balls, mistaken identities, midnight trysts, and duels to the death. By reimagining the story of Theseus and the Minotaur as a multi-sided love story for a seventeenth-century audience in New Spain, Sor Juana has created a new type of myth, one that speaks as clearly and powerfully to our contemporary moment as it did to the court of a Viceroy in colonial Mexico City.
Events
Humanities Event Series
The Humanities Program's signature series features poets, theater performances, and lectures. We invite students to engage with ancient and modern core texts in ways that encourage reflection on what gives one’s life value and meaning.
Teaching Conversations
This ongoing series of teaching conversations is held thrice quarterly for teaching assistants, faculty, and staff seeks to gather our community around the joy of teaching and living along with these core texts.