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.

Cette étude s'intéresse à la façon dont la fiction d'horreur arrive à provoquer chez ses lecteurs des réactions psychosomatiques de dégoût et de peur. Nous avons l'intention d'aborder ce genre à travers une approche centrée à la fois sur le texte et sur les procédés affectifs inhérents au processus de la réception, afin d'étudier la manière dont le récit d'horreur sollicite l'investissement émotionnel du lecteur. En prenant appui sur les stratégies narratives à l'œuvre dans la fiction de Brian Evenson, d'H. P. Lovecraft et de Stephen King, nous tenterons de circonscrire un certain nombre d'éléments textuels influençant la réception affective de ces textes et participant à l'émergence des effets de peur ; notre hypothèse étant que le roman d'horreur a recours à deux esthétiques visant différents effets sur la réception, soit une horreur corporelle et une horreur cognitive. Alors que la première vise à susciter des réactions physiques d'abjection chez le lecteur, la seconde s'attache davantage à créer de l'angoisse et de la terreur. Le dégoût ou le malaise ainsi suscités deviennent une caractéristique qui participe à la définition des sous-catégories du genre. Ces classifications ne sont toutefois pas étanches, puisqu'elles peuvent se combiner dans un même récit. Nous nous demanderons comment ces deux esthétiques se situent par rapport à un objectif commun, celui de générer des émotions et des sensations chez le lecteur, et aux moyens de quelles composantes formelles elles tentent d'y parvenir. Nous visons, à travers notre examen des stratégies narratives à l'œuvre dans les textes de fiction horrifique et des effets recherchés lors de la réception, à une meilleure compréhension de la dimension affective de la lecture. / This master's thesis looks at how horror fiction manages to provoke psychosomatic reactions of disgust and fear in its readers. We intend to study this genre through an approach that focuses both on the text and on the affective processes inherent to the reception process, to analyse how the horror narrative involves the reader's emotional investment. By analyzing the narrative strategies at work in the fiction of Brian Evenson, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King, we will attempt to identify a few textual elements that influence the affective reception of these texts. Our hypothesis is that the horror novel employs two narrative strategies to achieve different effects: body writing and cognitive writing. While the former aims to elicit physical reactions of abjection in the reader, the latter is more concerned with creating anguish and terror. The disgust and unease thus triggered become characteristics that help define the subcategories of the genre. These classifications are not hermetic, however, since they can be combined in the same story. We will be looking at how these two strategies relate to a common goal - generating emotions and sensations in the reader - and by means of which aesthetic components they attempt to achieve this. Through our examination of the narrative strategies at work in horror fiction texts and the effects sought during their reception, we aim to achieve a better understanding of the affective dimension of reading.