Numéro 5 Fins du monde

2014

Publication date: 31.12.2013

Licence: None

Editorial team

Rédacteur en chef Ewa M. Wierzbowska

Issue content

La narration d’une fin de cycle dans Fragments d’une histoire future de Gabriel Tarde

Christophe Premat

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 5 Fins du monde, 2014, pp. 9-28

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.14.001.2442

The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde is well-known for his theory of social imitation. His work Fragments d’une histoire future is less quoted as it is a prospective essay on the future of humanity. The article deals with the narrative of this history and focuses on the special writing of the end of a cycle. How do human beings react in extreme circumstances when one major source of energy disappears ? How do they change their traditional world vision ? What are the main values that we can save in order to ensure the revival of humanity ?

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Fin du monde, fins des mondes dans les opéras de Giuseppe Verdi

Christine Resche

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 5 Fins du monde, 2014, pp. 21-40

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.14.002.2443

Our work focuses on the symbolic representation of the end of the world(s) starting from « material imagination » and leading us to reflect upon the dramatic and literary dynamics (from Hugo and Shakespeare especially) upstream of Verdi’s operas. From the mythography of the four elements different figurations of time and end of worlds emerge. Indeed, time suddenly speeds up in Rigoletto in the midst of water imagery. In this work, Bakhtin’s « chronotope of crisis » comes into play, causing a reversal of the temporal direction and a precipitation of the passing of time embodied in the horse’ gallop-like concluding rhythm. This is the way Rigoletto's world finishes. On the other hand, a devastating and obscure time brings forth death in Macbeth which share an underlying Shakespearean substrate illustrating the end of universe and the beginning of the fall of Verdian hero.

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La fin du monde, la fin du « moi » ? Portait du personnage post-apocalyptique

Anaïs Boulard

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 5 Fins du monde, 2014, pp. 41-54

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.14.003.2444

The traumatic XXth century made humans believe their existence was getting close to an end. This worry is particularly noticeable in literature, where the "post-apocalyptic" genre is meeting a real success. There are many examples of it in the occidental contemporary literature, such as the British play « The tin can people » by Edward Bond, the French experimental novel Des anges mineurs by Antoine Volodine, or the famous American novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This study shows how the literary character is built in post-apocalyptic fictions. Men there seem to be, in fact, more of « subhumans ». So close to be dead, they seem to struggle with their memory and their language. Then, have we reached what Volodine calls « the end of Literature? » The post-apocalyptic character is fascinating because he’s a big paradox :

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Absences, traces et reliques dans les visions apocalyptiques de Pierre Michon et László Krasznahorkai

Chiara Fumagalli

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 5 Fins du monde, 2014, pp. 55-66

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.14.004.2445

In the 80s, the literary paradigm and the search of meaning in the contemporary literature change. We are the witnesses, in the literary scene, of the subject return and of the anthropological need of narration. Through the narration of life stories, « fragmented » destinies, reinvented biographies, we can see the both intention of resurrecting the « marginalia », the traces forgotten by history, and at the same time of an apocalyptic vision of symbolic destruction of the Modernity.

Messies postmodernes ou messies fin-de-vingtième-siècle ? Résistances d’une figure mythique de fin de l’histoire chez Saramago, Palahniuk et Volodine

Julie Schutz

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 5 Fins du monde, 2014, pp. 67-80

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.14.005.2446

This article analyzes the permanence of mythical Messiah figures in three western novels of the twentieth century’s last decade narrating the end of the history: Ensaio sobre a cegueira by José Saramago (1995), Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996) and Des anges mineurs by Antoine Volodine (1999). While these three novels distance themselves from the religious Judeo- Christian tradition, their aesthetics are also hypercritical of modernism. These Messiah figures are then reconfigured to deconstruct traditional and modernist concepts, and to reject these old ideologies. Above all, they embody the essence of the fictional project, by putting an end to the linear and monosemic story metanarrative so as to develop new narrative possibilities. We will therefore characterize these figures as turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury Messiahs rather than postmodern Messiahs, to the extent that they relate the death of ideologies, but also try to propose new metanarratives.

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Le dieu de la danse dans Till l’Espiègle de Téo Spychalski

Renata Jakubczuk

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 5 Fins du monde, 2014, pp. 81-92

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.14.006.2447

Till l’Espiègle – a theatrical production based on the Journal of Vaslav Nijinski, a Russian dancer of Polish descent – is a play of the Francophone theater. This play was presented for the first time in 1982 by a Quebec actor, Gabriel Arcand, in the Groupe de la Veillée of the Prospero Theater of Montreal. The theme of God is the main subject of the production. In this article, we are trying to demonstrate the dichotomy of the Nijinski’s microcosm: divided between the sacrum and profanum.

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« La terre entière fut remplie d'admiration et suivit la bête »: de crises et de fins

Jean-Pierre Thomas

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 5 Fins du monde, 2014, pp. 94-113

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.14.007.2448

Since, in American Superhero comic books, the planet Earth is constantly threatened of being destroyed by villains, entities with superpowers – Superman, Green Lantern or the X-Men – come to the rescue to prevent some apocalypse from happening. Does that mean that the ending that Superheroes go against is only a partial abolition and that death ends up being an unreal threat ? The meaning of that eschatology probably does not lie here in a straightforward retelling of founding stories, as the powers trying to get rid of humanity don't do it to punish it of some fault, contrary to the common example given by mythology. If the end of the world really is t h e recurring motif in Superhero comic books, it remains to be seen to what extent it does structure the medium.

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Le Sacrifice, Melancholia: La fin du monde comme espace cinématographique du rebelle

Éric De Thoisy

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 5 Fins du monde, 2014, pp. 115-129

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.14.008.2449

In the movie The Sacrifice (1986), directed by Andreï Tarkovski, nuclear war threatens the world and Alexander sacrifices himself to save the mankind. In Melancholia (2012), by the danish director Lars von Trier (who considers Tarkovski as his master), Justine welcomes the upcoming destruction of the earth by an extraplanet. Both directors use here a same context, the imminent end of the world, to build a peculiar and special character – a chosen one, the Rebel. Ernst Jünger 's figure of the Rebel (The Retreat into the Forest) will help us follow Tarkovski and Lars von Trier's paths through the apocalypse.

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La nostalgie du présent. De quasiekphrasis de M. Krysinska

Ewa Małgorzata Wierzbowska

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 5 Fins du monde, 2014, pp. 131-145

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.14.009.2450

La force du désir, a novel by Marie Krysinska, encourages the reader through the quasi-ekphrasis to expand his sense of sight and make the way he looks at the images of his environment more friendly – images, which, in potentia, could create works of art. Imaginative work is carried out through the memories of artwork (author’s, reader’s and hero’s) that have multiple layers, each formed by a specific moment of the past. The exploration of someone else – a painter by his artwork – becomes a self-exploration. The text of a novel is entirely structured by presence-absence of pieces of art. The memory which transposes into another spacetime sphere reinforces the present by adding to it an extraordinary, almost magical dimension. Nostalgy for the past is at the same time longing for the present, as the past locked in the artworks allows to capture the imponderabilia of present time, which otherwise would be inevitably lost.

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Słowa kluczowe: catastrophe, humor, aesthetics, humanity, civilization, climate change, solar energy, law of time, water, reversal of time, chronotope, darkness and death, post-apocalyptic, character, fragmentation, fiction, contemporary, time, destiny, subject, modernity, Messiah, postmodernism, twentieth-century nove, end of history, Nijinski, sacrum, profanum, Spychalski, Prospero Theater, comic books, superheroes, Apocalypse, prophecy, apocalypse, cinema, rebel, Jünger, sacrifice, ekphrasis, image, evocation, reconstruction, search for yourself