Entre vanité et art poétique : l’esthétique du rien chez Graham Swift
As a metaphor of the disintegration into nothingness, the ashes in Last Orders bespeak the mere nothing of life (« it aint nothing at all ») and appear in numerous descriptions which can then be read as revisited vanitas paintings. Swift’s challenge is to transform the mere nothing of life into a po...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2012-06-01
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| Series: | Études Britanniques Contemporaines |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1541 |
| Summary: | As a metaphor of the disintegration into nothingness, the ashes in Last Orders bespeak the mere nothing of life (« it aint nothing at all ») and appear in numerous descriptions which can then be read as revisited vanitas paintings. Swift’s challenge is to transform the mere nothing of life into a poetic totality and thus establish a bridge between life and literature, despair and art : « To build a bridge ! To span a void ! » Linking the entropic nothingness of the human condition and the literary sublimation of nothingness as an antidote to the void, Swift combines postmodernist nihilism and a romantic conception of demiurgic art. At the intersection of the two poles we find the concept of the sublime defined as the unrepresentable par excellence, the sublime of the void and the abyss. |
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| ISSN: | 1168-4917 2271-5444 |