Reading Garcilaso’s Love Sonnets in the Anotaciones: Relevance Theory and the Poetics of Failure

Abstract

This article applies the insights of Relevance Theory to examine how Fernando de Herrera’s commentarial strategies shape the readerly engagement with Garcilaso’s love sonnets in the Anotaciones by exploiting specific instances of relevance proper to the dynamics of the commentary genre. The analysis concludes that Herrera’s instrumentalization of inferential protraction across the commentary to ‘Soneto III’, ‘Soneto V’, and ‘Soneto VIII’ results in an interpretive model for the psychophysiological reading of Garcilaso’s love lyric which stylises the latter as a poetics of failure.