Introduction aux Actes

It would be useless to want to contain fragmented writing within a rigid theoretical framework as this phenomenon escapes systematization because of its paradoxical nature. Production in this fileld is very diversified. Some fragmentary writings are defined as such only because they reached us in this form, like the texts of Antiquity, often lacunar because of the dispersion of their corpus. Others, belonging to literary modernity, remained unfinished because of the the writer’s death. Others also have sometimes a fragmentary appearance without necessarily occupying a place of right in this writing typology, such as the short form, the maxim, the aphorism and even the romantic fragment. Finally, some works in fragments do not appear to aim at a full preliminary totality or to maintain some illusion of completeness. However paradoxical it may seem, the fragment becomes then a condition and purpose of the work of art, claiming the loss of the totality. Can one imagine to put some order in this category of transgeneric discourse ? It is one of the challenges under consideration in this Conference.