Can literature be perceived as an attempt to resist the movement inherent in life leading to disappearance? Because displacing death from a temporal perspective to a spatial one could enable man to actively take a stance, this dissertation explores how texts support the construction of spaces as means to accept death. More specifically, it focuses on medieval and contemporary texts to examine if the historical and sociological shift identified by Ariès from tame death in the Middle Ages to forbidden death today can also be found in the literary production of these periods. The dissertation begins with the study of narratives and plays by Marie de France, Cocteau, Maeterlinck, Giraudoux, Ghelderode, Ionesco and Sylvie Germain, all seemingly based on the double premise that circulations between a space of life and a space of death are possible, and that these spaces are geographically and economically connected. They prove to be flawed and impossible constructions, creating what Clément Rosset calls "doubles", deceiving images of a reality that cannot be represented: they only exist in the space of their narratives. In its second half, the dissertation relies on essays on images by Sartre and Berger to examine the notion of imaginary space in Proust, Germain, Guibert, Michon and Apollinaire. This space, modeled after Blanchot's literary space, is created through the relationship of an author and a reader via the shared experience of a text. At the intersection of the relationship between reality and images, the psuchē, or essence of the dead person, subsists in a public space structured around the survivors' subjectivities. In this space, which goes beyond memory, the dynamics of our devenir, as Deleuze defines it, is preserved. Through the exploration of the relations between spaces and texts, a new non-linear temporal model appears in the dialogue between a writer and a responsible reader, a movement within which the impregnable wall of death is at last successfully challenged.