Expurgation

Définitions de « expurgation »

Expurgation - Nom commun

• Procédé consistant à ôter d'un texte les parties jugées indésirables ou offensantes.

  L’expurgation se fait parfois en amont du texte, la narration désigne alors l’espace où la parole de l’autre aurait pu se déployer.

• En sylviculture, action d'éclaircir une futaie en supprimant certains arbres.

  Après une expurgation minutieusement réalisée, la futaie, autrefois dense et touffue, s'est transformée en une forêt ouverte et aérée.

Étymologie de « expurgation »

Évolution historique de l’usage du mot « expurgation » depuis 1800

Synonymes de « expurgation »

• exportation
• exploration
• expiation
• épuration

Citations contenant le mot « expurgation »

• Plus tôt cette année, rien, nulle part. a partagé « DEATH », un tout nouveau single accompagné d’un clip vidéo officiel diffusé sur la chaîne YouTube de Nothing, Nowhere. Le New York Times a salué «DEATH» comme une «expurgation émotionnelle scabreuse et immensément satisfaisante de Joe Mulherin qui déploie les premiers tambours des Beastie Boys et Rage Against the Machine». « DEATH » ne suit rien, nulle part. La version unique de « cauchemar », qui est arrivée avec un clip officiel, produit par Derek Maher / Scott Bell et réalisé par Patrick Lawler / Nothing, nulle part.

• But it turns out that the expurgation is more pervasive than we thought: Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie have been amended to take account of current sensitivities too. As for John Buchan, the only chance he has of being left well alone is that Penguin simply hasn’t got round to reading his stuff. There’s a reference to, I think, ‘a dirty Jew’ in one of the Richard Hannay novels; as for Prester John, let’s just hope that Penguin doesn’t realise it’s one of theirs and still in print.

• If you are white in America – nothing short of this expurgation will settle your soul and spirit. You are living in a troubled world and land because you have exchanged the peace that passes understanding for the baubles of what white men want you to see as valuable. It is a lie – and not only are you living it, you are forcing those whom you other to suffer unjustly to compensate for your avarice.

• Some have suggested the expurgation is tokenistic. One poster of colour on a Scrabble Facebook group said they welcomed the focus on racism, and thought the work should be extended to expunge any racism from Scrabble associations and clubs, but that they thought cutting words was misguided. (I noted no replies to the comment.) The hard and ongoing work of anti-racists, one suspects, is unlikely to be achieved by grand statements and rug-sweeping.

• Such textual expurgation has come to be known as bowdlerism, named after Thomas Bowdler, whose first “edited” volumes were of Shakespeare’s plays. The series, which went through several editions after its original publication in 1807, was lengthily subtitled:

• Censorship laws forced readers in Catholic Europe to alter their books in ways that have left lasting traces more than 400 years later. We can also see that as rigidly as these rules were laid down, their execution betrays a variety of impulses on the part of readers and censors. Expurgation was meant to correct a book and remove what was harmful, not to destroy the whole object. In a way then, expurgation made it possible for these books to avoid the inquisitors’ bonfires and find their way eventually to the corner of East 103rd Street and Fifth Avenue, bearing on their pages the scars of their histories in Counter-Reformation Europe.

Traductions du mot « expurgation »

Sources et ressources complémentaires

• Définitions du Littré (1872-1877)
• Définitions du Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, huitième édition (1932-1935)
• Définitions du Wiktionnaire
• Définitions du TLFi
• Synonymes de expurgation sur lebonsynonyme.fr