"Strategies and structures of mediation: The go-between from Roman comedy to ""Celestina"""
Rivera, Isidro de Jesus
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/22278
Description
Title
"Strategies and structures of mediation: The go-between from Roman comedy to ""Celestina"""
Author(s)
Rivera, Isidro de Jesus
Issue Date
1989
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Marchand, James W.
Department of Study
Comparative and World Literature
Discipline
Comparative and World Literature
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, Comparative
Literature, Medieval
Literature, Romance
Language
eng
Abstract
This study presents a survey and analysis of strategies of mediation in several works of medieval literature. My analysis focuses on the paradigm of mediation exemplified by the figure of the go-between. The study proposes to examine how the mediation of erotic and cultural codes receives concrete expression in the literature of the Middle Ages by means of the figure of the intermediary or go-between. Literature provides a medium with which to explore the issues of licit and illicit union and the ways in which culture represents these mechanisms. The go-between or intermediary in his or her most essential formulation provides intervention and mediation between parties. His or her activities mobilize a process which harmonizes differences and imposes order on a situation that appears chaotic. Our specific interest lies in mediation of sexual desires by means of an agent of intercession, the go-between who intervenes in situations where sexual access is desired, but not readily permitted, to lovers. As such, the intermediary effects a transfer of the erotic into the realm of the cultural, the sexual into the arena of human activity. This shifting is crucial because it resolves the tensions between the erotic and the cultural by adapting the codes that allow or prohibit sexual access.
The study opens with theoretical considerations of mediation, followed by a close look at Roman Comedy in order to define one particular mediation pattern which forms a backdrop for medieval literature. In Chapter Three, I consider the emergence of the go-between in medieval literature by looking at the influence of Arabic models. The next chapter analyzes the mediation paradigm present in Pamphilus de amore. Chapter Five extends this paradigm to other twelfth century Latin works including Andreas Capellanus' De amore, several of the elegiac comedies, and the anonymous Facetus. We turn our attention to courtly romance in Chapter Six in order to investigate the emergence of a variation on the mediation paradigm: Chretien's Yvain. The final chapter examines the working out of several mediation patterns in Fernando de Rojas's Celestina.
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