Key Concepts in Linguistics and Hispanic Literature

Cinemas: Gestures and Postures

Studying the gestures, manners, and postures. The movements of the face and body provide data about the personality and emotional state of individuals. The posture conveys the attitude in interaction with others.

Variety Diatopic

Variations occurring throughout the area over which a given language is spoken are reflected in history and dialects.

Professional Jargon

Members of some groups use a type of variation, difficult to understand for people outside their group, known as professional jargon: the medical, juridical, student areas, etc.

Lexeme

The minimum unit that lacks lexical morphemes, such as light, or it had dispensed with them, as bland to soften. It has a definable semantic meaning and dictionary entry, and is not like the grammatical morpheme.

Mudéjares

Muslims living in Christian territory who did not renounce their language or their beliefs.

Mozarabic

Hispano people keeping their language and religious beliefs.

Muwassahas

It has two kinds of rhymes:

• One for the first verses of each stanza.
• Another like it in the last lines of all stanzas.

Typically include a prelude, with the same rhyme as the final lines.

La Celestina: Hispanic Literary Masterpiece

Published in the late fifteenth century, La Celestina was a bestseller in the sixteenth century. In addition to Spain, it was printed in Castilian in other countries and translated into other languages.

Authorship Considerations

Today, it is accepted that acts II to XXI are the work of Fernando de Rojas; the first act could have been written by Rodrigo Cota.

Genre Debate

-Gender: Some critics consider La Celestina as a drama because it is built only by the characters, without the intervention of a narrator. For others, it is a novel in dialogue that realistically parodies the sentimental novel, especially the prison of love.

Context and Inheritance

La Celestina is situated in the context of humanistic comedy, which was read aloud in university settings and not represented on stage. It inherits the presentation of:

• Facts at the time
• Action in different places
• Uncertain duration of events
• Long monologues
• Anticlericalism

Key Characters

-Character: Callisto, Melibea, Celestina (the pimp), Parmeno, Sepronio (Servants of Callisto), Elicia and Areuse (Prostitutes friendly to Celestina), Pleberio, and Alisia.