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International audienceWhen, why, and how do people write about a natural disaster? The articlecharacterizes three ways of narrating catastrophe — allegorical, anecdotal, and historical—and shows that a shift toward the historical narrative takes place at the beginningof the seventeenth century, more precisely around 1630, and mainly in Italy. The mostlikely explanation is twofold. First, the interpretation of catastrophes no longer reliessolely on rehgious explanations, but political and polemical ones are also starting to beconsidered. Second, the expression of a point of view contributes to this increasedrecourse to the narrative. This article argues that the flourishing of catastrophe narrativesis related to interpretative conflicts. The second issue raised by this article is thedifference between factual and flctional narratives. This question is examined in thecontext of the historical experience constructed by the narrative. The fictional accountsof catastrophe will be characterized as such: fiction allows the disaster to be experiencedin a paradoxical relation to time, through the point of view of an "impossible witness.

International audienceThis paper is focused on travels from one world to another: from a fictional-world-in-a fictional-world to a real-world-in-a-fictional-world, in a historicaland theoretical perspective, from Jacques Alluis’ Ecole d’amour ou les Héros docteurs(1665) to Haruki Murakami’s End of the World (1985). In these works, fictionalcharacters overstep the limits between worlds and meet, and sometimes love ontologicallydifferent characters. What is at stake in these metalepsis is the concept offiction and the difference between fiction and non-fiction? Questioning the body ofnon-existent objects in these transfictional frames help us scrutinize their status