La lettre et la voix

From 1971 to 1992, the lectures Georges Duby gave at the Collège de France were often the raw material for his forthcoming books. They were so thematically, as the attempt to demonstrate here is made by analyzing the dynamics of what the historian called the “transmission” between teaching and writing. But they were also materially so, in terms of the manuscripts themselves, the first survey of which is provided here, based on a search through the material kept in the IMEC. There are many transcripts of lectures, annotated by Duby, demonstrating that he wrote literally over what he had said, thus saving himself from having to start from a blank page. But the discovery of the index cards he used when he lectured, already heavily written over themselves, reveals a very singular interplay between the written and the spoken word. Some elements of textual DNA in the various states of his drafts shed light on the stylistic framework and, beyond that, on the historical operation itself – from the initial written note on the documents to the creation of an arborescent plan, as can be seen in a few examples of the early drafts of Guillaume le Maréchal

Art · Art history · Humanities · Literature · Historical and Literary Analyses · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History