Šárka Novotná

The acedia gained many meanings during its etymological and conceptual development: first it meant the privation of care of the death people, then the privation of mental care which implied the solitude, fumbling for own fantasmas and melancholy which caused shifts the subjective visions of the world. Catherine Mavrikakis actualizes those meanings in her novel Deuils cannibales et mélancoliques, adding the relation to the body. The body becomes actor in the plays of the society: the commonwealth of people satisfied with the superficial impressions. In the same time it is the reference to death because the characters are whether “devoured” by the AIDS disease or by the melancholy which push them to the suicide. The fatality of the death and recurrent motives referring to the death condense the narration into the anxious erratic circle expressing the acedia of the current society.

To narrativize own phantasms and then live them: the love and the body in the theory of Roland Barthes

Since the 70's a specific theory of reading, writing and narrative perception originates in the thinking of Roland Barthes. Influenced by author’s reading of psychoanalytical and phenomenological writings now he turns to mental space of the reader - he cares about reader’s experience and, subsequently, his subjectivity and mainly phantasms, inner scenarios motivated by desire which in the Barthes’s work A Lover’s discourse: Fragments equal to figures. The notion of figure refers to another of important features of Barthes’s theory: we mean theatricality. The figures present the dramatic play within the text but also they challenge the reader to the game of codes: they aspire to become the projection space of identification. Our article then in its first part tries to present the epistemologic shift to the perception of narration and, in the second part, deals with the A Lover’s discourse: Fragments whose figures also represent the illustrated examples from the In search of lost time by Marcel Proust.

Our arti cle focuses on the apocalypse as the structure principle of novel saga Chronicles of Plateau-Mont-Royal. Tremblay, Québec author and playwrighter, creates an extense formati on, predesti nated to destructi on, because of prohibited, incest love which prefi gures an indispensable punishment and tragical end of one family, one world. The most tragical end comes in the case of Marcel, who balances between two worlds – imaginati ve and real – whose mutual tension he tries to overcome creati ng an alternati ve reality. But fi nally only reveals the empti ness of both spheres and the impossibillity of any salvati on. The purpose of our text consists not only in reconstructi on of the apocalypse as the philosophy-theological concept of the ontological negati on, but also in another meanings, which are rated by mythological recourse an religious mythemes raising the tragic end of Tremblay´s novel universe.