Verbum – Analecta Neolatina

Déchets, débris et autres matières et choses inutiles dans la littérature, la pensée et les arts

Zuzana Malinovská — 2025-05-06

Que faire des matières et des choses dont nous n’avons plus usage et dont nous voulons nous débarrasser ? La question des restes inutilisables et encombrants, souvent sales ou toxiques, devient l’impératif écologique et hygiéniste du siècle. Placée au centre des préoccupations des spécialistes, la problématique envahit aussi le discours public. Problème à résoudre et symptôme de l’époque, les matières et choses inutiles motivent également la création.

Le présent numéro de Verbum, exclusivement francophone, rassemble les réflexions des chercheurs en littérature, en philosophie et en théorie de l’art au sujet de différentes représentations des matières et choses inutiles.

Pour balayer les détritus de la littérature française

Sylviane Coyault — 2025-05-06

Rubbish, useless things and fragments took on considerable importance in literature from the realist period in nineteenth-century France onwards. This phenomenon seems to have intensified in the twentieth century, starting with the New Novel and ‘chosisme’. In recent years, ecological concerns have led to the emergence of new works on the treatment of waste around the world. We can also see the strange literary fertility of this motif, and even its poetic effectiveness, because of its melancholic and nostalgic charge and its temporal value.

Humain trop humain

Katia Hayek — 2025-05-06

The entry into the Anthropocene would manifest itself not only in the production of waste, dependent on the activities of a homo faber on the way to a homo oeconomicus, but also in a metamorphosis of the human being or, at least, of our understanding of his being. This reflection on the Being in the Anthropocene is the focus of Warax, a speculative novel by Pavel Hak (2009). This French-speaking Czech author, who emigrated to France as Milan Kundera, specialises in what is now known as the literature of violence. Warax is a novel of war, in which the avatars of the foul accumulate. Playing on the multiple meanings of waste, from the city to the military zone, it invites us to reflect on the status of human beings in an ultra-contemporary era: hasn't the Anthropocene led to a mutation of humanity and its perception under the sign of waste?

Vacuité, déchets et fragmentation dans La Brûlerie d’Émile Ollivier

Petr Kyloušek — 2025-05-06

Émile Ollivier (1940–2002) is one of the Haitian diaspora writers who, in collaboration with Italian-Québécois authors and critics, contributed to the transformation of migrant discourse in the 1990s, both theoretically and critically, as well as scripturally. Two works by Émile Ollivier are analyzed: the essays Repérages (2001) and the novel La Brûlerie (2004), whose narrativity is based on the dynamic tension between disappearance and recovery, both considered within a ongoing projectivity, the central point being the void of the present that must be filled and materialized using the remnants of the past. This writing of the in-between manifests itself at different levels of text organization: spatiality, temporality, characters, plot, function of language. Ollivier's poetics contributed to the integration of migrant discourse into the Quebec canon of the new millennium, presenting analogies with the works of several Quebec authors (Dickner, Vadnais, Kurtness, Mavrikakis, Britt) and manifesting similar tendencies.

« Une vie parmi les déchets »

Eva Voldřichová Beránková — 2025-05-06

In his documentary There’s Something in the Water, Elliot Page met with Aboriginal and Black communities in Nova Scotia to explore with them the issues surrounding the destruction of their environment. The term “environmental racism”, coined by Benjamin Chavis and adopted by Page, now refers to the tendency of Western countries to stockpile toxic waste and to set up companies discharging pollutants near racialized communities. A whole “waste literature” is emerging, straddling ecopoetics, the post-Anthropocene and political activism. Native writers no longer sing the praises of the Canadian landscape and the traditional life of Amerindian hunters but turn their lenses on the “belly” of Montreal to bear witness to the lives of all those Aboriginals who represent 1% of the city's population, but 10% of its homeless. The article analyzes Michel Jean's novel Tiochtiá:ke, representative of the emerging genre of the urban native novel, and its relationship with “trash literature”.

Fragments, déchets et choses inutiles dans Nikolski de Nicolas Dickner

Zuzana Malinovská — 2025-05-06

This article is a case study focusing on Nikolski (2005), the first novel by the contemporary Quebec writer Nicolas Dickner. My analysis aims to show that the aesthetics of this multifaceted novel is based on fragmentation and on the enormous imaginative potential of waste and rubbish. I begin by examining fragmentation as Dickner’s main narrative strategy, visible at both deep and superficial levels of the text. I also consider how fragments function in the novel: it turns out that they point to the fragmented nature of knowledge and at the same time serve to engage the reader. Secondly, I reflect on waste, an essential and recurring thematic component in the novel, and on the different meanings it carries. The case study concludes with an overview of Dickner’s perception of useless materials and things as expressed in his playful and instructive puzzle novel, devoid of any explicit ideology.

Fragments de la fin du monde qui n’a pas eu lieu à travers Tarmac de Nicolas Dickner

Dalibor Žíla — 2025-05-06

Born into a family obsessed with the end of the world, where each member receives their own vision of the Apocalypse, accompanied by a specific date, teenage Hope Randall seeks to obtain her own date of the Apocalypse, as family tradition demands. Hope, apart from being a Randall, has grown up between two significant sources for the development of an imaginary of the end of the world: The Bible and media. The Bible was her mother’s favourite reading, a universe to which Hope was exposed since her childhood. Accelerated speed of the narration, richness of cultural references and imaginary of the end of the world make Tarmac part of a contemporary trend in Quebec literature. In our contribution, we will analyse the fragments of prophecies of the Apocalypse in this work in relation to its representations of the imaginary end of the world and the perspective of Québec literature.

Passé colonial et objectification moderne dans Mathématiques congolaises d’In Koli Jean Bofane

Vojtěch Šarše — 2025-05-06

In this article, we focus on the first novel written by Congolese author In Koli Jean Bofane, entitled Mathématiques congolaises (2008). The work will deal mainly with three types of objects represented in this work: colonial, colonised and decolonised. Our main aim will be to show how colonisation has influenced the material objects present in this fictional story. Above all, it will be a question of the residue of colonial objects, the image of the prestige of the West, which continue to exert a certain influence. In our contribution, we will problematize the presence of all the material objects reflected in the chosen novel. So-called local objects represent nothing more than useless waste as a result of cultural alienation, and colonial objects cannot be fully embraced by colonised and post-colonial societies, because they are inevitably deterritorialized and still have an influence on the societal hierarchy – in this case – of Kinshasa.

Reliques et déchets dans Le Guépard (Il Gattopardo) de G. Tomasi di Lampedusa

Tivadar Palágyi — 2025-05-06

The Sicilian novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), written between 1955 and 1957 by Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, is a reflection on the political and social changes brought about in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies by Italian unity in 1860–1861. The aim of this article is to highlight the importance in the novel of relics, rubbish and objects abandoned after the death of their owners. On the one hand, their fate symbolises social transformations, but on a more general level it also suggests the ephemeral and tragic nature of human existence.

Les Liaisons dangereuses, « matière à recycler » : que reste-t-il du roman de Laclos dans Lady Susan de Jane Austen ?

Andrea Tureková — 2025-05-06

This paper focuses on the “recycling” of Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses in Lady Susan, one of Jane Austen’s earliest works. While the novelist did not rewrite Les Liaisons dangereuses, she did “recycle” its material on several levels, reusing certain elements of the plot, exploiting the form of epistolary polyphony and, above all, drawing inspiration from the character of the Marquise de Merteuil to create her own heroine. By examining these three points, the paper seeks to shed light on what might be considered the “residue” of Laclos’s novel in that of Austen.

Réception fragmentaire : la poésie de Philippe Jaccottet en Slovaquie

Ema Palková — 2025-05-06

Philippe Jaccottet has produced an extraordinarily rich work of translations, essays, and poetry. He quickly made a name for himself in French-language literature. In Slovakia, however, only a selection, compiled by translator and poet Vlastimil Kovalčík, was published in the journal Slovenské pohľady (Slovak Views) in 2010. Nevertheless, it appears that the selection proposed by Kovalčík is problematic due to its fragmentary nature – he only works with extracts of poems from compact cycles, omitting important words. As a result, only the ‘rest’ of Jaccottet’s poetics will reach the Slovak reader through this translation. Nevertheless, Jaccottet has the potential to be accepted in the Slovak cultural space, as his poetry has great similarities with one of the most significant lines of contemporary Slovak poetry, i.e. spiritual poetry inspired by nature.

Art ou déchet ? La question d’où l’on regarde, à partir de l’exemple du tomason

Christelle Nicolas — 2025-05-06

This article shows how a fragment of architecture, a waste product specific to a society in the process of modernization, the tomason in Japan from the 1970s onwards, came to re-evaluate a certain vision of art (object, author) in particular through a specific relationship to space. The tomason refers to an artistic practice little known in the West, which a recent publication has just highlighted (Akasegawa 2024). This will enable us to develop new links with other artistic and cultural practices.

« Mes fragments » : la reconstruction (im)possible de l’oeuvre littéraire de Maximilian Lamberg

Jaroslav Stanovský — 2025-05-06

This article presents and analyses the ‘fragments’ of the works of Maximilian Lamberg (1729–1792), i.e. his marginal, unfinished or lost texts. In order to reconstruct Maximilian Lamberg’s bibliography as completely as possible, it is necessary to carry out a real historical investigation in search of his marginal texts. This research will enable us to situate Maximilian Lamberg more clearly on the map of the eighteenth-century ‘Republic of Letters’, and to grasp his writing in its variety of forms and registers. In addition, according to the example of Lamberg, we would also like to develop a more general problem: how can the historical profession itself enrich literary history, and what tools are available to researchers? Why is it important to reconstruct the complete works of an almost forgotten author in order to better understand the forms of literary life in the Europe of the Enlightenment? And what are the limits of such an approach?

Des fragments de savoirs à la construction de la pensée dans l’essai : le cas des Céphalophores de Sylvie Germain

Silvia Rybárová — 2025-05-06

The essay as a literary genre represents reflective writing, generally consisting of fragments that provide a partial and subjective view of philosophical thoughts or literary texts. Compared to other literary forms and genres, it allows human life to be expressed in a specific way. Sylvie Germain deals in her writings with metaphysical questions and often does so deploying fragments of literary works, biblical images or poetry. Such fragmentary cultural references provide stimuli and starting points for her thinking, allowing not only for reviving source texts but also for producing new meanings. Hence, it could be argued that the author wilfully employs discontinuity as an essential practice for expressing her vision of the world. The study aims to draw out the discontinuous character of the essay through Céphalophores (1997), one of her first collections of essays.

Les ordures, les déchets, les restes en tant qu’objets intentionnels, non intentionnels, non idéaux ou réels : une analyse ingardenienne libre

Wojciech Starzyński — 2025-05-06

This paper examines the ontological status of waste, garbage, and remnants, exploring their nature as intentional, non-intentional, ideal, or real objects. Drawing upon Roman Ingarden’s philosophy, the study seeks to apply his categories of intentionality and reality to objects typically seen as marginal. The analysis considers the intentional and unintentional dimensions of human actions that generate waste, particularly in technical, artistic, and scientific contexts. It further explores the ontological and ethical implications of waste, emphasizing its dual relationship to human thought and reality. The paper ultimately aims to contribute to a broader understanding of how waste can be positioned within Ingarden’s ontological framework, bridging the gap between theoretical reflection and real-world phenomena.

Que reste-t-il de nos… fruits ? Réflexions sur les restes de fruits dans les arts figuratifs

Katalin Bartha-Kovács — 2025-05-06

The aim of the study is to examine the representation of fruit in the figurative arts, looking for the signs of decay and also of the destruction of time. Two cases will be examined: firstly, we will observe a number of seventeenth-century fruit still lifes, in order to identify the signs of disintegration of living matter. Considering the perspective of the reception of these paintings, we will also reveal that the image of decomposing fruit appeals not only to the sense of sight, but also to the viewer’s other senses. We will then analyse an impressive example of contemporary art: the statues of apple cores by the Hungarian sculptor Attila Rajcsók, which illustrate the artistic shaping of living matter that has been almost entirely destroyed. These sculptures call into question the apparently durable yet more or less ephemeral nature of all works of art.

Déchets, ordures dans les représentations picturales de la vie rurale et paysanne

Katalin Varró — 2025-05-06

This article focuses on the analysis of two paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a 16th-century Flemish painter who illustrated the life of peasants of his time. The first painting by Bruegel discussed in this article is The Battle of Carnival and Lent, which shows his unique point of view at the time, inspired by the art of Hieronymus Bosch and referring to the remarkable image of religious festivals. In this painting, which contains many actions and habits of that time in villages during the Easter festival, the ground plan catches our attention, for the waste and remains of everything that is to be found at a funfair. In the symbolism of these elements, we find the two sides, probably represented exaggeratedly and in an allegorical manner, of joy and suffering. The other painting discussed, Flemish Proverbs, also provides us with many examples of rubbish to show the daily life caricatured by Bruegel’s brush: we are dealing with some facets of this episode represented in this painting, as a mark of the 16th century.