But this is not the case with Gesta Francorum, Galbert of Bruges, Raol (on the conquest of Lisbon), Caffaro, Henry of Livonia etc. This connection has been overlooked for several reasons, primarily because Latin and vernacular literatures are often considered each on their own terms, compartmentalized into two ›traditions‹ in which Latin seems to bear an automatic tag as learned and ecclesiastical. These possibilities were exploited and pushed forward both in Latin and vernacular historiography. New roles of book writing coincided with a larger social spread among authors as well as with a new library horizon – books now began to circulate at higher speed, in greater numbers and in less solemn circumstances. Connections are suggested by combining the characteristics of such writing with book and library history as well with social history. This contribution proposes to compare, but also to connect, the rise of a new type of unlearned historical report, ›fast historiography‹, in Latin and vernacular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Conversely, reading the utopian Le Degré zero de l’écriture and, especially, the melancholic La Chambre claire alongside medieval Grail romances helps us to see how the quest for an (envisaged or lost) ideal inspires both, and to understand the role of form and the impetus for renewal in Barthes’s final published essay. Barthes helps us to see how a deliberate “loss of color” helps to generate a new vision of the world - which, for early French prose, was linked to the idealism and violence of crusading. Why, then, did it enjoy international success? The same question may be asked of early photography, self-evidently so much poorer than painting. French literary prose, which came to the fore suddenly around 1200 ce, presents itself as an impoverished form of writing lacking the vividness and drama of the well-established verse narration.

Part of my project on literary form in translation, this article stages a dialogue between, on the one hand, the formal and stylistic qualities of medieval literary French prose in the first half-century of its practice, and, on the other, Roland Barthes’s essays on zero-degree writing and on photography.

Sciarrino Let Me Die Before I Wake Pdf