POETICS AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF FRAGMENT : MORALIST LITERATURE RECONSIDERED

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Since the rise of the "Nouvelle Critique", French critics, more and more interested in fragmentary ways of writing, have appreciated various brief texts, for example, Pre-Socratic fragments and some twentieth century writings (Bataille, Valery). In the same way, new approaches arose in late 70s in the field of studies on seventeenth century moralists : one tried to enlarge the corpus with the view to clarify the concept of man, his passions, his characters and manners in this period, in regard to recent works on history of ideas, of religion and of mentalite ; another examined the patterns and senses of fragment form, typical of moralists' works, in the light of classical rhetoric and in comparison with lineal discourse. Following this movement, we tried to throw a new light on the subject, by means of a diachronic research and from a non-western point of view. Investigator Nakaji traced the destiny of Japanese "poeme en prose" - poetry not necessarily moralist, but essentially related to fragmentary writing - which developed under the influence of French literature. Head investigator Shiokawa reported in France the fact that the Japanese readers had received Pascal in the first place as a moralist. International symposium : 《Poetique et anthropologie du fragment : Moralistes reconsideres》, held in November 2001, was a fruit of three years' investigation, where three of our investigators, with two foreign researchers, exchanged their ideas. (For further details, see the booklet we publish in March 2002.) We'd like to add that, thanks to this grant-in-aid, we acquired a good collection of French moralists' works in the classical period.