The fragment is a prosifiée literary form of an extreme brevity.

The form is very old, exists in all the languages. Thus, about the year 1000, the Japanese poetess Sei Shônagon, lady's companion of the Sadako empress, inventories in Makura-No-sôshi ( Notes of bedside , literally Poèmes with the pillow ) what she likes, which she hates, which she finds ridiculous, or sad. It inaugurates a new literary kind, the zuihitsu ( with the wire of the brush ).

In France, this type of writing is started again by Felix Fénéon and its Nouvelles in three lines . Other authors, since, dug this furrow, sometimes autobiographical. Let us quote, inter alia, the oulipiens Georges Perec (and his book I remember ) and Herve Tellier (and amnesics did not live anything of unforgettable , answer to the question Of what you do think? ), or Michelle Grangaud, for her collection Gesture . Valerie Mrejen (in wild Water , the perfume of his/her father) called upon this form to evoke its family memories. Laurent Bourdelas, with " The Way of Indigotiers" or " Chronicles of Aubos" , is one of these contemporary authors of the fragment, greeted for example by France Culture; the same applies to Patrick Mialon or Colette Corneille.

Is also connected there forms like the fragments of the human Comedy in the Ébauches attached to the human Comedy of Balzac, the very short news of Philippe Cousin, Jacques Sternberg or like the Nanotexte S of Patrick Moser.

The shape of the fragment questions the fractionation of the memory and the thought. It brings back to compartmental and ridiculous, therefore, contradictorily, with a form of universality.