Fascinated by the paintings of Chardin, Diderot demonstrates the superiority of this painter on numerous painters of history. So, the critic knocks down the hierarchy of the genres defined by Félibien in the XVIIth century. He pupil Chardin to the rank of demiurge because the artist manages paradoxically to breathe life into his still lives. Indeed, Chardin is a scholar colorer and he imitates perfectly the flesh, what makes it a rial of the nature.

Based on Leo Marx’s expression, « the technological sublime », this article analyzes science and technology as new incarnations of the sublime in nineteenth-century literature. The characteristics of the sublime, as defined by Edmund Burke, were formerly attributed to nature in Romantic literature. In his novel, The Future Eve, published in 1886, French writer Villiers narrates the creation of a machine woman, described as a « sublime creature », illustrating nineteenth-century new faith in science.

According to Spengler the experience of modernity is marked by the struggle of organic nature against inorganic minerality, and of blood’s supremacy against money’s abstraction. The city is the matterly and symbolic place of this era, where inorganic economy wins over cosmic order, and avant-garde over traditions. Trees disappear as physical presence and as metaphysical symbol of transcendence. According to Deleuze literature offer the signs of a plant imagery made of trees, leaves, flowers, musk, rhizomes, grass and algae. The book can be like a tree, the image of an organic order, or Whitman’s grass growing in any place, or the inorganic rhizomatic structure of Joyce and Proust’s chaos, fragmentation and decomposition. Opposite stands Henry Miller’s interpretation of D. H. Lawrence’s works and life as symbol of the cosmic tree standing like De l’arbre à l’herbe à l’arbre : nature morte et nature vivante en littérature 55 Christ’s cross in the middle of the petrified forest. The desert or wasted land of modernity.

This essay aims to highlight the representations of ambivalent nature in Albert Camus’ work. Key theme within the author’s literary and philosophical approach, nature has spread into all his writings. Great symbol of the world’s beauty, nature echoes its absurdity at the same time. Therefore, it shapes a contradictory background in which a human being should live; through silent images describing namely the sun, the sky, the sea and the stone, Camus faces up nature’s death as an occasion to get into the solitude of existence. From that point of view, and throughout his entire work, nature is certainly not dead; the object of this paper is to examine how natural imagery is actually portraying the absurd connection between the man and the world.

This article aims to study some French poems of Giorgio De Chirico and to investigate his lyrical still lifes in comparison with his figurative representations of the same subjects. Starting from the consideration that the French term “nature morte” has not the same meaning than the German term Stilleben, we would like to point out that literally speaking the German version means “a silent nature” giving an interpretation that is the most close to the reality. We often confound death with the lack of sound, with a tranquility that, on the contrary, is not a form of death. Death has always been De Chirico’s biggest attraction, as we can see reading his poems.

Paul Claudel’s interest for still life seems directly inspired by the research of the symbolic meaning conveyed, for the believer, by the inanimate objects that it gathers. In the present study, I would like to show that Claudel explains still life not so much like an exegete as like a restless beholder of the painting. The visible surface is less the mirror of invisible than a field of strains that stirs the plain obviousness about the immobility in that genre. Free from knowledge prejudice, his inquisitive writing claims its right for creation. Beyond the Introduction to Dutch painting and Claudel’s work, this study binds the fascination for still life with the ambiguity of its translation by nature morte and suggests that its literary success might well do without hermeneutics.

The image of an eroded stone on which writing represents no longer a text but a mere trace revealing a human passage is a major theme in the works of the Francophone poet Philippe Jaccottet. On the one hand, the written stone appears as a visual analogon of the poetical discourse, depriving it of its sacred immortal aura and announcing prophetically its approaching death. On the other hand, its dullness and its density express symbolically the challenge that the subject launches against death, justifying Jaccottet’s predilection for the mineral imagery as a metapoetic element.

Pascal Quignard – contemporary French writer winner of the Prix Goncourt in 2002 – admits he seeks his models on the side of unknown musicians, erotic painters, all artists left out of account history. Indirectly addressing the issue of still lifes, Pascal Quignard located in the lineage of Marcel Proust, who defines the still lifes in his book Chardin and Rembrandt, as the way to fix the imprint of time. An expression of the seventeenth century that Quignard summarizes the captivating charm of these paintings: still life paintings are coites. In fact, what is now called improperly still lifes had to name this time “life coye” quiet life. These terms do not characterize a genre, they reflect the spiritual aspiration of these paintings.

Is a (female) corpse just another object like any other to be set in a still life? What displacements and reconfigurations occur when still life imperatives cross the Ophelian artistic tradition? The article examines poetical and photographic reinvestments of the 20th and 21st centuries, in a comparative perspective, the tensions and paradoxes at stake that allow us nonetheless to read these images as contemporary still lifes “with Drowned Girl”. In an explicit dialogue with previous works of still life, the poems and photographs examined combine minute transcription, high focus and sense of the uncanny, a tension between spatiality and temporality, offering highly conscious artworks as means of raising both gender and genre issues.

What are we becoming, us and our memory, when our « places », which are spaces significantly invested by social, cultural and spiritual practices, are being converted into « non-places », into « spaces which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity » (Augé) ? This question underlies the fictional work of Still Life (Jia Zhangke, 2006), a movie about the dismantling, the ruining of the ancient city of Fengje due to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. By becoming ruins, the material and symbolic substance from which the inhabitants can create their personal and collective memories is being « veiled »,is being made unreadable. The purpose of this article is to analyse how the cinematographic still lifes invented by Jia, since they critically mediate it, revive this substance, make it readable again, and, consequently, allow the creation of diverse memories.

This article focuses on the specificity of the Mesozoic still-life and his relations with contemporary days, and even with futuristic novel. Museum of dust and bones, the dinosaur figures a hyperbolized still-life and insist on the theme of the vanitas. In Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton introduces such vanitas, but also distorts it: when dinosaurs rise from the dead, human beings have to turn into still-life to avoid the predator’s jaws. Our main goal is to ask the possibility of connections between still-life and adventure fiction. Can the still-life support such a fiction, far from the classical idea of Art’s notion?

Catulle Mendès was a nineteenth century French poet, novelist, librettist, literary and music critic, very famous at his times but unjustly depreciated by the next generations. The paper reminds the sphere of his activity that should never be forgotten: Mendès appears first of all as one of the main figures of the early French Wagnerism. Born in Bordeaux on the 22nd May 1841 (twenty eight years to the day after the German Master!), he got to know Richard Wagner in Paris in 1860 where the composer was giving his three famous concerts at the Italian Theatre (Théâtre-Italien) and obtained, thanks to Princess Pauline Metternich, the chance to perform his opera Tannhäuser at the Paris Opera. Twentyyear- old Mendès invited Richard Wagner to cooperate with the periodical that he had just founded, La Revue fantaisiste. However Wagner hasn’t published any text in La Revue fantaisiste. Disgusted by his Tannhäuser’s failure in Paris, he left the French capital soon. Catulle Mendès missed the good occasion to create the first French « revue wagnérienne ». Firstly, his journal’s reaction to the scandal at the Paris Opera was very terse. Secondly, Auguste de Gasperini’s study of Wagner’s operas, announced by Mendès, was going to be published not in La Revue fantaisiste, but in Le Ménestrel, the most antiwagnerian French journal of these times. Thirdly, the number of texts on music in general and on Wagner in particular published by the journal founded by Catulle Mendès was extremely small and didn’t reflect in any way his musical or Wagnerian fascinations. A few years later, in summer 1869, Catulle Mendès with his wife Judith Mendès, née Gautier, and their friend Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam paid a visit to Richard Wagner in Tribschen. It was a crucial moment for the development of their wagnerism. In September 1869 they observed in Munich the conflict between the composer and his patron, the king Ludwig II of Bavaria who wanted the first part of Wagner’s Tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung, The Rhine Gold, to be performed then in Munich, despite the opposition of the author who preferred to keep all the parts of his monumental cycle for the new opera house that he was intending to construct as soon as possible somewhere in Bavaria. In 1879 Catulle Mendès wrote un roman à clef, a novel with a key, entitled Le Roi vierge – The Virgin king portraying the king Ludwig II of Bavaria and his complex relationship with Richard Wagner. This novel’s distribution in Bavaria was formally prohibited by the King who hadn’t appreciated its literary quality and his own portrait « painted » by the French writer. Responding to the King’s resolution, Catulle Mendès in 1886, a few months before Ludwig’s mysterious death, published another text à clef on Ludwig II of Bavaria and Richard Wagner. The short text entitled L’Épître au roi de Thuringe (The Epistle to the king of Thuringia) reflects their conflict of 1869 and enhances the role of a group of French Wagner’s admirers supporting the German composer in his struggle against his patron’s despotism. These two texts, Le Roi vierge and L’Épître au roi de Thuringe, are thoroughly analyzed by the author of the paper as literary expressions of Catulle Mendès’s Wagnerism.

Sensitive to all the nuances, attentive observer, Marie Krysinska thinks deeply about the human condition. One of its components is wandering − in every sense of the word. The wandering, physical and psychological, is a natural state of man. Wandering in imagination, in memory, expatriation, evaluation mistakes… The absoluteness of wandering can put the sign of equality between wandering and imagination. Imaginative ability determines the existence of the human being. I wander, you wander, they wander − in the poetry of Krysinska man is combined with all sorts of wandering. To wander means here to look, to try to answer the cardinal questions of human existence.

A surface of a human skin determines a border between outer and inner sphere. Tightness of this division, however, is a subject to permanent perturbation. It makes human skin a fascinating mean of communication. The visual arts (ex. body art) and literature derive from that potential. In that context, human skin appears as a place where Julia Kristeva’s distinction between « symbolic » and « semiotic » diffuses. A body becomes a corps parlant (speaking body). This process of body writing is analyzed by a collation of Lorette Nobécourt’s book La Démangeaison (Itching) and some body art’s enterprises.