Ce travail de thèse a pour objectif d’étudier l’une des modalités particulières de la réception de l’œuvre de Brian Evenson : la réserve. A la lecture de l’œuvre de Brian Evenson, des béances apparaissent, signes d’un évidement d’une partie du texte antérieur au début du récit. Le lecteur fait alors l’expérience du manque. En quête d’un tout qui serait à reconstituer, ainsi que d’une unité rassurante et pourtant si illusoire, le lecteur entreprend de tenter de combler les creux du texte grâce à son imagination. Il produit des interprétations, mais celles-ci reposent sur des univers qui apparaissent comme déréférencés, et dont les points de repère s’effacent. Il fait ainsi une expérience de lecture de l’incertitude, tant les univers présentés par le texte sont instables, criblés d’anomalies linguistiques. Ses interprétations sont aussi source d’équivoque, mettant ainsi en échec de manière permanente toutes ses tentatives de résolution. Or, ces trébuchements successifs sont aussi facteurs de l’expression d’une prolifération interprétative qui fait retentir celle, diégétique et linguistique, qui est à l’origine des ambiguïtés du texte. Ainsi, l’échec des tentatives du lecteur de suppléer au manque donnent lieu à un deuxième temps de l’expérience de lecture, au sein de laquelle il est invité à faire résonner, dans la chambre d’écho que constituent l’œuvre, toutes les potentialités du texte. Le lecteur produit ainsi, au moyen de son imagination, une forme d’excès au texte qui vient suppléer, par substitution, celui qui ne s’écrit plus qu’en creux des espaces blancs. La prolifération langagière et le jaillissement perpétuel du sens que ce nouvel excès autorise assurent une expérience de lecture du foisonnement qui se superpose à celle, initiale, de la perte. / This dissertation focuses on one of the more singular modes of reception in Brian Evenson’s body of work: reticence. While reading Brian Evenson’s works, the reader is made aware of gaps, that seem to point to the existence of a missing part of the text, hollowed out from the narrative before it has even started. The reader then experiences a form of deficiency that he identifies in the text as coming from what is missing. As he tries to reconstruct the text and to make it whole once again, as illusory as that concept might be, the reader attemps to fills the gaps through the workings of his imagination. He then produces interpretations, but those rest on constructed worlds that see their rare landmarks being gradually erased. His reading experience is imbued with uncertainty, mainly because the worlds the stories are set in are unstable and populated with linguistic anomalies. Moreover, his interpretations generate more uncertainty, thus thwarting his attempts to resolve the ambiguities of the text permanently. However, while stumbling on the elusive meaning and the prevailing ambivalence, he discovers that the proliferation of his interpretations brings forth that of the narrative and linguistic proliferation at the root of the many ambiguities of the text. Thus, the failed attempts of the reader to fill the gaps in the text give way to a second reading experience, during which he must ensure that all the potential intepretations are summoned in the text. With the help of his imagination, the reader thus produces a form of textual excess that must substitute itself to the one that he can barely sense in the white spaces of the text. The proliferation of language and the perpetual surging of meaning that this new excess allows insure a reading experience of proliferation superimposed on top of the initial experience of loss.

This thesis seeks to understand how we read and understand the use of depictions of violence by examining its rhetorical presentation. Although the media gives us a mixed understanding of the way that experiencing violence secondarily (that is, through all types of media) affects us, scholarship in this area has proved clear connections between viewing/experiencing depictions of violence and raised levels of aggression. On the other hand, there is a clear difference between gratuitous depictions of violence and socially useful depictions of violence (i.e., the difference between a slasher movie and a holocaust movie) that that area of scholarship does not expressly take into account. I argue that the language of trauma studies has the ability to evaluate the impact of violent texts on audiences and that Kenneth Burke's Dramatistic Pentad has the ability the examine depictions of violence to uncover explicit and hidden ideologies that affect the presentation of the violence and, thus, our reception and interpretation of that violence. Working in conjunction, these two theories can help audience's understand depictions of violence on an ideological level and help them to assess the violence's potential traumatic impact on themselves and others within certain contexts. To demonstrate this theory of understanding violence, I make two short analyses of Native Son and The Lovely Bones and demonstrate an in-depth analysis of Fight Club and Blood Meridian in order to give an example of the type of reading I am advocating and its potential for understanding and interpreting depictions of violence in ways that uncover both social benefit and harm. In the end, I hope that this theory of reading violence might extend beyond the sample readings I have done and into other types of media, so that we can all understand the ways that violence is used rhetorically for social and political purposes and be able to both use it and interpret it responsibly.