Celestina and the Threshold of Modernity

FAIN: FS-50171-08

University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)
E. Michael Gerli (Project Director: March 2008 to June 2010)

A five-week seminar to engage fifteen college and university faculty in a close reading of the late fifteenth-century Spanish novel, Celestina, in relation to a wide range of historical and literary contexts.

This five-week summer seminar covers critical perspectives on Celestina, the late fifteenth-century Castilian work composed in dialogue dealing with love, religion, prostitution, witchcraft, and death that is often seen as marking the break in Iberia from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The seminar will explore just what in Celestina is medieval and what is modern, and why literary historians have been led repeatedly to characterize Celestina as a liminal work situated at the threshold of modernity. On a broader plane, the seminar will examine and interrogate many of the basic assumptions underpinning the notions of both "medieval" and "modern" in order to explore Celestina's historical place in the context of these critical concepts. Celestina constitutes one of the staples of undergraduate introductory courses on Hispanic literature and culture in U.S. colleges and universities. The seminar will be held on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.