Abstract EN:

The biblical curse of the city tends to devastate History, turning human culture into a waste land (Henochia, the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Babylon) in order to settle instead the first ever divine city, that is to say the utopian New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse. At the beginning of the 20th century, rewriting the Bible has become ironic and even self-destructive. The inner fortress of the creative mind does not hold any more and loses itself into the modernistic fragments of the city, in other words the ruins of destroyed Europe. The prophetic word declines, even though it has been reactivated on a political level by dystopian literatures, speculative fiction and crime novel. After 1945, the urban curse has mutated into evil energy, following the laws of entropy. A new kind of apocalypse turns the text of the cityu into mere simulacra, in other words the new idols of mass culture. That’s why entropic metaphors and postmodern aesthetics do shape American urban fiction and also the french nouveau roman. The myth of cursed cities dominates the end of the century in a cannibalistic way, thus becoming the myth of the disappearance of the sacred, raising a wall of silence in the city’s rumble, penetrating the smooth surface of minimalist novels. Literature then performs an act of memorial resistance, even when it follows an asymptotic line to the “hard white empty core of the world. ”