NEH Celestina Seminar - Seminar Information

Send completed applications to:

E. Michael Gerli
University of Virginia
PO Box 400777
Charlottesville, VA 22904

2009 NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers
Celestina and the Threshold of Modernity

Director: E. Michael Gerli
Location: The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
Dates: July 6 - August 7, 2009

Dear Colleague:

            Thank you for your interest in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers on “Celestina and the Threshold of Modernity.” The seminar will be held at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, between July 6 and August 7, 2009. By means of this letter, I wish to invite your application to participate in this exciting project.

            The purpose of this five-week NEH Summer Seminar is to share and discover with fifteen colleagues from other institutions a series of critical perspectives on Celestina, the late fifteenth-century Castilian work composed in dialogue dealing with love, religion, prostitution, witchcraft, money, and death. Celestina is often seen as a work that marks the break in Iberia from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, yet just why this is so remains a matter of conjecture. The seminar would concentrate on Celestina, seeking to examine and debate just what in it is in fact medieval and what is modern, and why literary historians have been led repeatedly to characterize it as a liminal work situated at the threshold of early modernity. On a broader plane, in the seminar we would also examine and interrogate many of the basic statements and assumptions underpinning the notions of both “medieval” and “modern” in order to explore Celestina's historical place in the context of these critical concepts.

            I think the topic of the seminar is significant for several reasons. First, because Celestina is among a very small number of works that has been continually read in the Spanish speaking world since its initial appearance (1499). Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has also served as a critical touchstone for defining the Hispanic literary tradition. Many of the central issues of medieval studies seem to converge in it: the nature of manuscript and print culture, the character and relevance of authorship (the collective or singular nature of the work is hotly disputed), language and ethics, medieval methods of interpretation, questions of love, death, desire, and damnation, humor and solemnity, the “high” and the “low,” morality and irony, and history and fiction, to name but a few. Verbally rich and socially complex (it depicts an unstable, rapidly changing society), Celestina also constitutes one of the staples of undergraduate introductory courses on Hispanic literature and culture in U.S. colleges and universities. As interest in the Hispanic world has grown in the American academy, the work is being rapidly adopted in general interdisciplinary undergraduate courses in medieval and early modern studies as well.

            By focusing on Celestina’s cultural poetics in the context of the medieval/modern debate the seminar will allow scholars from different fields to bring together diverse critical and pedagogical issues framed by one broad question: How can we make the most of contextual cultural information about late medieval narrative without losing sight of the work itself? Through an essentially eclectic approach, we shall attempt to combine the virtues of traditional philology and historical study, with their emphases on archival scholarship and intellectual and political history, with the different kinds of interdisciplinary cultural and anthropological approaches that are the focus of the “new” historicism. Rather than embrace any one critical mode, the diverse strategies we shall pursue will allow participants to compare, evaluate, and apply a broad range of interpretive theories and methodologies in seminar discussions and individual projects. The unconstrained, interdisciplinary critical paradigm of the seminar will thus encourage members of the group to proceed in ways that are compatible with their own interests and study projects.

            My motivation to direct this seminar grows out of an abiding interest in Celestina. Over the course of the last thirty years I have continued to teach it and carry out research and publish my findings on it. The results of my investigations can be found in a dozen scholarly articles and a forthcoming book that deal either directly or indirectly with it and its influence. As a result, I eagerly look forward to dialogue with colleagues participating in the seminar. Our collective endeavors and discussions will be complemented by two visiting lecturers, Professor Joseph Snow of Michigan State, and Professor Eukene Lacarra Lanz of the Universidad del País Vasco. In the first days of the seminar, Dr. Snow will help us understand the broad cultural impact of Celestina across the ages as we examine the work’s manifestations into modernity and postmodernity. Later in the seminar, Dr. Lacarra will help us examine the representation of sex, gender, and politics in the work, and where Celestina might figure in them. In short, it will be an exciting opportunity to study aspects of the work which have received very little critical attention, yet offer important clues to the cultural logic of Celestina. Many additional topics will be covered during the five weeks of study. (A tentative Study Plan outlining the topics and questions to be asked during the five weeks follows as a separate document.)

            Since one of the main purposes of the seminar will be to explore Celestina with a broad audience of medievalists and early modernists, participants need not be Hispanists. I’ve designed the seminar so that the ideal participant is someone with a broad knowledge of medieval and early modern studies who seeks to acquire an even greater interdisciplinary understanding of these periods and a more intimate knowledge of Iberian culture and its impact on world cultures in general. In this way, I hope the seminar will appeal to a broad spectrum of teachers of medieval and early modern literature at both college and junior college levels. I particularly encourage colleagues in Comparative Literature to apply for the seminar, even though they might not be able to use Spanish as a conversational tool. Nothing would be better than to test hypotheses across different languages and literary traditions as they emerge from our discussions. The main goal of the seminar is to enable colleagues to be better able to enter into the ongoing critical conversations about the Middle Ages and early modernity by exploring and assessing some of the liveliest issues currently being discussed. Thus, although a reading knowledge of Spanish would be ideal, the language in which seminar will be conducted will be determined by the composition of the group. Several good English translations of Celestina are available, so potential applicants should not feel constrained by the issue of language.

            In this kind of seminar there is no uniform expectation about individual work to be undertaken, but I anticipate that many will want to complete a piece of scholarly research and writing, or perhaps a draft of an article that can become definitive in the course of the following academic year. Others might wish to work on curricular or other types of projects that would advance their teaching and research. To aid in that purpose, colleagues will be offered the opportunity to make formal presentations to the group based on their aspirations and individual projects. Discussion each week will revolve around the issues of Celestina outlined in the Study Plan plus a list of readings placed on reserve at the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library. Three two-hour sessions per week during the first two weeks will allow the group sufficient time to attune to the terminology, purposes, and expectations of the seminar. If the initial level of enthusiasm for discussion is sustained, as I suspect it will be, we can schedule additional hours to meet and begin fleshing out ideas for seminar projects. During the last three weeks of the seminar the meetings will be reduced to two and one-half-hour sessions per week to allow more time for colleagues to work on individual projects. Because one practical aim of the seminar is to strike a balance between seminar preparation and research time, we will exercise flexibility in assignments and give first priority to participants’ individual needs. Sessions may be supplemented according to demand, of course, and will be accompanied by regularly scheduled private consultations to help sharpen the focus and limit the range of individual projects.

            All seminar sessions will be held around the spacious conference table in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese’s Del Greco Library, where a substantial collection of reference and primary texts are but an arm’s length away. Ideally, each seminar session will consist of brief presentations by colleagues, who will pose questions and issues for open dialogue about the primary text within the context of the week’s framing problem or theme. The discussion may vary according to need and interest, but at all times everyone will be encouraged to bring forth their own individual projects and lead the discussion, with an eye toward exploring further the problems at hand. In the last two weeks we will set time aside for the individual presentations and collective critique of the projects in course.

            The University of Virginia in Charlottesville, with its active summer programs and renowned Rare Book School, provides an ideal host setting for the seminar. The fully air-conditioned Alderman Graduate Research Library, with a collection exceeding two million volumes, houses the principal items on the seminar’s reference list. All seminar participants will have library borrowing and stack privileges, along with open carrels, in Alderman for the duration of the seminar. Through their status as Visiting Scholars at the University of Virginia, the participants will be eligible for campus-wide library borrowing privileges as well, access to eight additional university libraries and a total collection running well into the tens of millions of volumes, all conveniently located in the immediate area. The primary books and journals essential to the course of study will be placed on reserve at the library prior to the arrival of seminar participants in Charlottesville.

            Computers and access to World Wide Web resources and e-mail, in addition to the University of Virginia’s vast electronic text archive and other data bases, are available to all participants in the libraries of the university. Libraries are open from 8:30 AM - 9:00 PM Monday through Friday, and from 10:00 AM -8:00 PM Saturdays and Sundays during the summer.

            Living accommodations have been arranged to provide maximum flexibility and comfort. I have made arrangements for participants to be housed in the University’s Copeley Apartment complex, with nearby parking, within distance of Alderman Library, the Information Technology Center, and UVA’s Newcomb Hall, the University Student Center. Copeley offers two bedroom air-conditioned apartments, each with a kitchen, living/dining area, and one an a half baths. Each bedroom has two single beds, two wardrobes, and two desks. Bedrooms have one phone with a toll-restricted line and voicemail. There are wireless and ethernet connections in each room for access to the UVA network and the internet. Finally, Copley offers two wheel-chair accessible apartments which can house a total of eight individuals.

            The proposed 2009 rate at Copeley for an Economy Single is $36.00 per person per night, and $25.00 per person per night for double occupancy; Premium Service singles are $50.00 per night, and $36.00 for doubles (all include a $2.75 per person per day Program Fee charged by Facilities Management). Participants will be required to provide their own bed linen and towels. Ample laundry facilities are, however, available for residents at the Copeley Apartments. Parking at Copeley is available for $15 per week. Arrangements for Meal Plans may also be made at a moderate cost. However, there are many good, reasonably priced restaurants, cafés, and sandwich shops in the immediate area.

            I would encourage all participants to avail themselves of the university housing facilities for at least two reasons. First, because they offer convenient, comfortable quarters with kitchen facilities and are a relatively inexpensive alternative to higher off-campus rentals. And second, because the university’s housing offers ready access to public transportation, the Barracks Road Shopping Center, and the University Student Center with, among other things, a bookstore, a campus grocery, several cafeterias, snack shops, cafés, restaurants, lounges, and public meeting rooms. Of course, should any participant prefer to live off-campus, I will be happy, together with the University Housing Office, to assist in locating suitable accommodations. Summer sublet rentals are generally affordable and available in Charlottesville during the summer. Rents run between $550-900 per month depending on the type of accommodations.

            The University of Virginia is a distinguished academic institution with an international reputation located in the heart of Virginia’s Piedmont and an academic community known for its cultural vibrancy and historical interest. Summer in Charlottesville is a lively season. During their stay colleagues will have access to the city’s bustling cultural life: movies, music, museums, libraries, many, many book stores, restaurants, recreational areas, and important sights of historical interest (e.g., Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and James Madison’s Montpelier), to name but a few. Prior to their arrival, along with their letters of acceptance, participants will receive a current information booklet about the numerous activities at UVA scheduled for the coming summer. In sum, few universities and few cities have as much to offer during the summer months as the University of Virginia and Charlottesville

            Finally all colleagues selected to participate will receive a stipend of $3,800 for the five weeks. The first half of the stipend will be provided in the form of a check upon arrival. The remaining portion of the stipend will be disbursed at the end of the second week of the seminar.

            If you wish to apply, application information and guidelines may be obtained by clicking HERE. Your completed application should be postmarked no later than March 2, 2009, and should be addressed as follows:

            E. Michael Gerli
            NEH Celestina Seminar
            Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
            115 Wilson Hall
            Box 400777
            University of Virginia
            Charlottesville, VA 22903-4777

Perhaps the most important part of your application will be the accompanying essay submitted as part of your completed application. This essay should include any personal and academic information that you feel is relevant; the reasons for applying to participate in this project; your interest, both intellectual and personal, in the topic; your qualifications to do the work involved in the project; the type of contribution you can make to the seminar; what you hope to accomplish by participating, including any individual research and writing projects; and the connection of the study to your teaching. Applicants will be notified by mail about selection on April 1.

Thank you for your interest in the seminar. My colleagues and I on the selection committee look forward to receiving and reviewing your application.

Yours sincerely,

Michael Gerli

This program is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency.

STUDY PLAN

CONTENTS OF THE WEEKLY SESSIONS

            WEEK 1 - The Poetics of Literature and the Poetics of Culture: Critical Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Medieval and Early Modern Studies. During the first week, we will take up the general issues regarding the question of literary and cultural poetics in an attempt to construct the foundation for the deliberations to follow. Specifically, we will read selected essays that examine the historical and philosophical definitions of poetics in literature; the peculiar interpretive problems of late medieval texts; poetics as distinct from the allied fields of criticism and theory; and explore the set of synchronic intertextual and discursive relations that exist in texts at given moments in a culture's production. The rest of the week will be devoted to familiarizing ourselves with, and discussing, the problems posed by interdisciplinarity in reference to Philology as it was traditionally practiced until the last two decades of the twentieth century. We will discuss in detail the issues posed by nineteenth-century Positivism's desire to recuperate satisfactorily the past: the cultural and ideological forces shaping the discipline of Philology itself as it emerged from the Enlightenment, and how it developed up to our present time, configured often by the will to find reason and sense in fragments and discontinuities, and by the desire to identify a “literature” that forms part of a canon and the cultural genealogy of a particular nation.

            WEEK 2 - Medieval and Modern: Texts and Contexts. The History of Celestina Criticism and Interpretation. We will examine and discuss the history of Celestina criticism since the early nineteenth century, particularly those statements that repeatedly identify the work as marking a crucial transition from medieval to modern sensibilities, in an attempt to locate just what in it led to the formulation of this recurrent critical perception. After this, we will work with current formulations of the Middle Ages and of modernity (Le Goff, Ariès, Foucault, Benjamin, Haidu, Cascardi, etc.), while seeking to critique the critical statements on Celestina examined in the earlier part of the week’s discussion. We will broach two related critical problems: the often contradictory interpretations of Celestina--one as an orthodox didactic work; the other as a subversion of Christian values under the guise of their affirmation--along with Fernando de Rojas’ putative converso ideology. Finally, in light of all this, complemented by a lecture by Professor Joseph Snow on the critical history of the work, we will seek to synthesize the history of Celestina criticism attempting to identify in that body of work the major assumptions and ideological postulates used to fashion the models of interpretation employed to explain the text. Within this context, the group would be asked to pursue a discussion of just what constitutes something that is “medieval,” and just what are the signs of “modernity.” It is hoped that fresh insights and new approaches to the question of Celestina’s often noted modernity will issue from this dialogue.

            WEEK 3 - Cultural Contingencies: Literature, Theology, Philosophy, and the Law in Celestina. We will seek to enlarge upon the greater cultural context which produced the work by exploring questions of Literature, Theology, Philosophy, and the Law (especially questions raised by the disciplinary polemic on the nature of social and religious conflict in late fifteenth-century Castile), and how these interact at the level of the text. We will take up Celestina's thematic repertoire—language, love, desire, God, destiny, and death, and collate these with analogues from medieval theological, philosophical, legal, and literary sources. One important subject for discussion here is the ideology (as opposed to declarations of belletristic intention) of the prologue to Celestina--its insistence on the ubiquity of discord and conflict in the world--and its relation to the cultural poetics embraced by the book (the set of interlocking tropes and similitudes, the shared code, with the other discourses that circumscribe it). We would then undertake a retrospective reading of the prologue centering on the work's belletristic intentions balanced by the views expressed in the text itself. Discussion will include the (often polemical) comparison between Celestina and its earlier, Latin and Castilian sources. An ancillary point for further dialogue will be the relations between these source texts and their reception by the Castilian work. Finally, along with this, we will lay the groundwork for discussion of the relationship between Celestina itself and its reception by later authors who both imitated it and wrote commentaries upon it (Feliciano de Silva, Gaspar Gómez, the anonymous author(s) of the Comedia Thebayda, Comedia Serafina, Comedia Hipólita, and Comedia Policiana, Alonso de Villegas, Juan Rodríguez Florián, Juan de Valdés, Lope de Vega, and finally Cervantes). Participants engaged in projects that involve aspects of Celestina's sources, sequels, or reception will be encouraged to make presentations, or at least sketches of them, at this point.

            WEEK 4 - Cultural Contingencies: Science, the World, Nature, Self, and the Other in Celestina. Our discussion of Celestina here will allow us to broach, as a general critical problem, the relations between medieval texts, science, the representation of the human subject, and emerging early modern notions of the natural world (Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Averroism in particular). We shall inquire into the extent to which the Fernando de Rojas’ knowledge of science and natural philosophy, especially those ideas known to be circulating at the University of Salamanca when he was a student there, prescribes the interpretation of the work. Extended comparisons with other contemporary authors (Alfonso de Madrigal, Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, Juan de Mena, the Bachiller Alfonso de la Torre, and Juan de Lucena, for example) will become relevant as we address the status of “literature” within the problematic of moral action in the natural world. Especially relevant here will be an examination of the work's characters and their motivations as they relate to the depiction of natural imperatives, temptation, and desire. The author’s inscription of ethical and legal boundaries trespassed by ambition and desire leading to social upheaval and death will be taken up in tandem with his use of language and the unstable depiction of the truth in the text. Our conversation, complemented by a lecture from Professor Eukene Lacarra on polity, truancy, and law in the work, will address two related questions looking both backward and forward in the seminar's schedule: 1) Celestina's construction of literary personae, and the reading and interpretation of Aristotle's naturalist philosophy (coupled with Rojas’ possible atheism) vis-à-vis the implicit and explicit knowledge of moral philosophy exhibited throughout the work: and 2) Celestina's representation of a pluralistic world of masters and servants who inhabit a community characterized by competition, trespass, and violent conflict as seen against the backdrop of current statements on the role of otherness in constituting cultural identity and production, as we confront questions of linguistic, social, and political inclusion in early modern Iberia and, for comparative purposes, discuss the pertinence of Celestina to contemporary notions of class, culture, and cultural poetics, relating these to the current American social engagement with identity and multiculturalism in historical and critical perspectives. Contextual materials will be drawn out of primary and secondary sources on the political and social history of late medieval and early modern Spain. Time will be set aside for participants' presentations centering on religion, multiculturalism, social discord, politics, and Celestina's poetics.

            WEEK 5 - Death, Desire, and Modernity in Celestina. In this final week, we will seek to recapitulate our findings in order to define the cultural poetics of modernity in Celestina and the advantages of interdisciplinary methodologies for the more complete understanding of late medieval and early modern texts in general. The goal will be to arrive at a synthesis of what it meant to read Celestina then and now, while grasping the contingent forces that are both the agent and the outcome of the practices which constitute the work for both its late medieval and contemporary modern readers. We will attempt to forge a conclusion of what it meant to peruse Celestina at the dawn of modernity and what it means to read it today, both as students of the past and as humanists in general. At this point, I will expect that all the participants’ presentations will have been made and fully discussed.