Skip to main content

To Camelot

This week we step away from the Renaissance into the world of Medieval Romance. The writing of a romance, a genre almost entirely consisting with arranging and juggling inherited courtly and popular motifs, seems worlds away from a modern conception of the ideal work of literature as original. And yet – the perpetuation of Arthurian-based television programs and movies seems to suggest we’re as susceptible to retellings as our medieval ancestors. G and I confirmed this by spending an inordinate amount of time on youtube watching (generally awful) trailers of King Arthur, Tristan + Isolde, Merlin, the Mists of Avalon, b, Camelot etc. The best – I tried to convince G – is obviously First Knight. It might be light on the adultery and magic, but it has cheese: tinny armour and swords, a misty Round Table montage, dark-haired Richard Gere crying, a leaf turned into a cup for forest rain-water.




I have, however, just become aware of Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac and Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois. To watch these would be an excellent repeating of the past, a re-engagement with English Romance as inherited from the French whim for Celtic lore.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The School of Hard Knocks

It is my current hope to go to graduate school for English literature next year: a certain school in a certain place, both a goal and an insurmountable challenge. Having been out of college for a year already, and having graduated as a music major, I am rusty. Trying to compensate, I googled “books every english major has read” but have had a difficult time finding a list that suggests what every (generalized) English major should have read by the time of (undergraduate) graduation. As a person who attended a high school whose meager syllabus prescribed the study of one novel, one play and four poems a year, and who could only scrape enough college literature credits for a minor, I feel woefully behind. Most American kids got a head start in AP English (seriously – who are those freaks who read Ulysses in high school?). American high schools may have their weaknesses, but a strong and ambitious push to read literature consistently is not one of them. There are gaps, and I fear that wh...
8 comments
Read more

Natural Love

We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .
6 comments
Read more
I’ve a short story in the latest edition of The Stinging Fly , which is a brilliant Irish literary journal. If you’d like a copy (or if you like Claire-Louise Bennett or Kevin Barry or Danielle McLaughlin or Colin Barrett, who’ve all been published by SF ) you can get it here Or, you know, go to Dublin.
1 comment
Read more