Dead cities, dying cities. Poetics of destruction in the Sorj Chalandon's novel

Abstract

Particularly productive during the fin-de-siècle literature, the literary motif of dead cities is instilled with a new meaning in the Sorj Chalandon’s novel Le quatrième mur. Sorj Chalandon implements a poetics of sacking by which the devastated city becomes both a fictional and tragic space of creation where the genre of the tomb is re-invented