Celestina: Genre and Rhetoric

Abstract

Professor Fraker argues that the Celestina, however original or singular, does not embody a new discourse, and falls easily within the literary norms of its time. Thus on the one hand it belongs to a genre, comedy, the term taken in a sense perfectly accessible to the two authors and their contemporaries. On the other, the detail and fabric of the work is in great part genuinely rhetorical. In his approach to the question of genre, Professor Fraker draws on four texts familiar to students at the time of composition of the work: the description of the comic plot in the section on narratio in the De inventione, the essays of Evanthius and Donatus which introduce the latter's commentary on Terence, and the commentary proper. Throughout his study Professor Fraker maintains a sense of paradox: the Celestina, by any standards unique, is nevertheless entirely conservative and traditional if considered from the viewpoint of form or mode of discourse.