Nawelle Lechevalier-Bekadar is an associate professor at Rennes 2 University. She is the author of a thesis entitled “Something was wrong”: The Aesthetics of Malaise in Brian Evenson’s work to be published by Sorbonne Université Presses. She has just published Brian Evenson: L’empire de la cruauté at the Presses Universitaires de Rennes, a collective work co-edited with Sylvie Bauer and Florian Tréguer. She currently works on questions of violence, malaise and fanaticism in contemporary American literature.
“Prairie” by Brian Evenson offers a chronotope of wandering in which genres jarringly intermingle. The short story draws from the western, post-apocalyptic fiction, and romance, and offers a space both rife with meaning and incomprehensible. This article aims at analyzing how the text explores a desert in the etymological sense, a space deserted, abandoned by God but also a space devoid of “sertum,” that is to say devoid of any link, untied, in which genres interlace and unravel to produce a horrific language, the meaning of which we intuit rather than fully grasp.
