A Book Called 'Celestina'

Catalog description

The course will deal exclusively with Celestina and examine it in its varying incarnations ('Comedia' 'Tragicomedia' 'Prologada,' etc., beginning with the putative 1499 Burgos edition and continuing through the Valencia 1514 text). Topics to be discussed within the context of the semester are: textual history (books, printers, and the book trade in early modern times); the history of the language and the problems of multiple authorship; Celestina and the medieval Latin tradition (Petrarch, Seneca, Ovid, the Ovidian tale, Humanistic Comedy, etc.); medieval sentimental literature and the question of intertextual parody; the cancionero tradition and the composition of Celestina; naturalist philosophy, fifteenth-century love literature (particularly love sickness and medical lore), the University of Salamanca, and the work's intellectual and ideological context; questions of intentionality, critical distortions, and the problem of converso authorship; humor, puns, and esoteric jokes; narrative technique (the effaced narrator); characterization and the subversion of normativity; tradition and innovation in the work's composition (rhetoric), plus other relevant themes.