Publication details
Between the End of the World and the End of the Novel: The Disintegration of Literary Form in Selected Works by Patrik Ouředník
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The subversion of traditional novelistic form (“traditional” in the vein of the realist novel) and the dismantling of genre stereotypes are among the defining features of the poetics of the Czech-French writer Patrik Ouředník. One of its fundamental principles is the connection between the disintegration of literary form and the depiction of the erosion of language’s meaning. In his writing, Ouředník proceeds from the assumption that the “truth of the age” can be expressed through the “language of the age”—this assumption also forms the basis for the two thematic strands of this paper: the poetics of the end, that is, of a vanishing age or an age in crisis (Kermode, Ricour, Abbott), and the language through which this poetics is articulated (Pellegrini). From a broader perspective, this paper traces variations on the motif of the end in Ouředník’s prose and, in greater detail, focuses on the interpretation of the experimental novel The End of the World Might Not Have Taken Place (2018), in which the author deliberately blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the text’s fragmentary form and its cultural content interact and how this dialogue is reflected in the reader’s experience. The paper culminates in an analysis of the novel’s reception and a comparison of Czech and French critical responses with those of ordinary readers (Databáze knih, Goodreads, Babelio), interpreted within the theoretical framework proposed by Rita Felski in Uses of Literature (2008) and Hooked (2020). |
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