« Prairie » de Brian Evenson : un espace du desertum

Authors

Keywords:

Desert, Horror, Wilderness, Cults, Historical romance, Malaise

Abstract

“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.

Author Biography

Nawelle Lechevalier-Bekadar, University of Rennes 2

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.

Leaves n°13 : The Desert and the USA

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Published

2022-01-31

How to Cite

Lechevalier-Bekadar, N. (2022). « Prairie » de Brian Evenson : un espace du desertum. Leaves, (13), 53–62. Retrieved from https://revues.u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr/leaves/article/view/375

Issue

No. 13 (2022): The Desert and the USA

Section

Collection of articles

License

Copyright (c) 2022 Nawelle Lechevalier-Bekadar

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.