Écrire la fin du monde: poétique de l’ellipse dans “Le Phénomène futur” de Mallarmé

This essay discusses how the figure of “the end of the world” is used in one of Mallarmé’s early prose poems, “Le Phénomène futur.” While this poem has often been read as an exposition of Mallarmé’s aesthetic ideal, I argue that it is informed by a complex conflict between two modes of writing the end of the world, one aestheticizing and apocalyptic and the other sharply prosaic. In the wake of Baudelaire’s reading of the poem, I analyse how Mallarmé’s poetics of the ellipse resist the dramatization of the end of the world as a sublime event, and I discuss what conceptions of poetic form emerge from that conflict. (in French)