{"word_count": 240, "character_count": 1572}
Vincent Martins (Université Clermont Auvergne)[télécharger la proposition]            William Shakespeare’s King Lear and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire are both built around a natural disaster imbued with multiple layers of meaning. The motto “winter is coming” in the fantasy saga literally announces an upcoming winter, which paves the way to the supernatural threat of the White Walkers, but also symbolizes the political crisis which destabilize the Seven Kingdoms. In King Lear, the storm can be read as Lear’s materialized tumultuous state of mind provoked by the disunification of both his kingdom and family. The semantic syllepsis of the saga and the polysemic storm thus act as the warning signs of the impending systemic collapse looming over the two crumbling worlds.            Since the multiple catastrophes destabilize the kingdom and lead to the downfall of the society, it opens the way to a collapsological reading of the two works. As collapsology has mostly studied the collapse of societies from a civilizational perspective, this paper aims at focusing on two fictional collapses and, therefore, on their literary construction. First, I will highlight the apocalyptic imagery of the collapse built around the entanglement between the natural, the supernatural and the political. Then, I will focus on the character’s rejection and denial of the warning signs announcing the collapse. Finally, among the numerous reactions regarding the downfall of society, some characters accept the warning and try to confront the upcoming collapse.