Cadavres, carottes et casquettes De l’objet à l’effacement du sujet

In prose, whether novelistic or not, as in nineteenth-century pictorial still lifes, isolated objects proliferate—often lowly, and sometimes repulsive ones. Does this trend stem from a taste for provocation? An expression of anger? A fascination with the horrible and the aesthetic potential it contains? Or, perhaps, a desire to use those “subjects” impugned by academic art in order to question this latter and examine more closely what underlies the principles of representation in literature and painting?