General comment on the vidas' posts

Thanks a lot for your comments on the vidas. I am making a general post/comment because I wanted to include this picture of the cover of Jim Morrison's biography. I think that the picturesque elements are very important in the vidas and it makes them function as portraits, or even icons of the performers. You all pointed out the materiality of the sentences, the crucial role of memory and the paradoxical factual/fictional style. Each sentence constitutes one particular trait of a figure that has to be remembered. And this act of remembering is directed both towards the past, since it already contains a form of nostalgia, and towards the future, in order to make these performers legendary. I think it is fascinating to see how these vidas prefigure the marketing fabrication of a star nowadays. I picked up Jim Morrison because this portrait of him has become iconic and because a lot of biographers were looking at his songs in order to find out about his life. The performative portrait is then built from the performance itself, which creates a complex mise en abyme. I also chose him because he reflected a lot on performance and performativity, being extremely interested by the Living Theater of Judith Malina and Julian Beck, which I think could help us reflect on medieval theater performances.