Modernist authors repeatedly created fictions that showed the deleterious effects of poor reading practices. This talk shows the dangerous or deadly effects of uncritical reading in works of Conrad, Joyce, and Katherine Mansfield and goes on to discuss the ways in which the characters’ interpretive dilemmas are re-staged within the text for the reader to experience. This often results in the creation of a text designed for two implied readers, one of which is aware of the limitations of the other. Thus, characters in Conrad’s early text, “An Outpost of Progress” (1899). The men, who manage a trading station in Africa, find some torn books left behind by their predecessor. For the first time, they read imaginative literature, greedily consuming fiction by Dumas, Fenimore Cooper, and Balzac. In the same paragraph, they are depicted reading imperial propaganda in an old newspaper; here too, they have a naive and credulous response to the material, their emotions are readily manipulated by the author, and they are entirely unable to read either text critically. Enjoying the way they had been cast as significant agents in this impressive narrative of imperial enlightenment, “Carlier and Kayerts read, wondered, and began to think better of themselves” (94-95). Somewhat later they find themselves involved in the more brutal aspects of colonialism and soon they become implicated in slave trading. Implicit in Conrad’s tale is a sustained critique of any simplistically mimetic approach to reading, a keen awareness of the fabricated nature of all writings, the motives behind their production and the methods by which they attain their emotional effects, as well as a more general suspicion toward widely held or officially sanctioned worldviews. The characters’ inability to read either kind of text critically—to see through the two related kinds of fabrication—contributes to their deaths. Their ignorance and helplessness are vividly contrasted to the knowledge and pragmatism of the African bookkeeper, Makola. Elsewhere in modernist fiction, we see that uncritical reading is associated with delusion, failure, and death. This narrative strategy is then juxtaposed to African American authors’ works directed to two different and at times opposed readerships, white and Black, as the concept of the dual implied reader is further developed and extended. Numerous works employ this division, including the stories of Charles Chesnutt, Ralph Ellison's *Invisible Man,* and Ishmael Reed's *Flight to Canada.* Ellison discloses the material effects of reading and being (mis)read, laying particular stress on the writing of history and the documentation of those who are usually written out of its pages. Reed discloses the unexpected virtues and dangers of reading in his novel, as when his protagonist publishes a poem which brings him fame, but it “also tracked him down. It pointed to where he were hiding. It was their bloodhound” (13). I theorize this practice, too.

While self-reflexivity has been a part of comics almost since the art form's inception, it is mainly since the end of the 20th century that metacomics has diversified to include a look at the now long history of what French specialists call the "ninth art" itself. This gesture, which aims in particular to claim for comics the status of a recognized art form, also takes into account the tradition of comic-book bashing: in an often humorous way, comics take up the criticism of comics, which have long been seen as unserious, as a low art form, as reserved for a children’s audience to whom it might even be harmful. Yet this self-reflexive questioning of comics is often accompanied by the depiction of a vertiginous fictional immersion that risks engulfing real readers and fictional characters alike.

Does this fear of comics also reflect a fear of fiction in general? Or of some type of popular fiction that is perceived as particularly dangerous?

Focusing on a selection of European and North American comics, I will discuss the link between metafiction and fear of fiction in the specific context of an art combining text and image.

My talk will consider direct criticisms of comics, as in "Ex Libris" (2021) by US artist Matt Madden, for example, when one of the many volumes of comics read by the character (and the reader through his eyes) opens on a page where a librarian warns against comics, “seduction of the innocent” – an obvious reference to Fredric Wertham’s infamous 1954 pamphlet. In other works, classic criticism is taken up by the characters themselves, by an unsympathetic grumpy old man in Quebec writer Jean-Paul Eid’s "Le Fond du trou" (2011), or on the contrary in a touching way in German artist Flix’s rewriting of "Don Quixote" (2012): Alonso Quijano, the new Don Quixote, writes to a local newspaper to complain about comics that, in his view, “have nothing to do with reality”. Other works evoke the fear of comics in more subtle ways, such as Schuiten and Peeters’ archivist character, relegated to the “myths and legends subsection” - or, more symbolically, the “great void” that threatens to swallow up Imbattable, the very special superhero by French author Pascal Jousselin, or the ground that slips away from Julius Corentin Acquefacques, Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s famous hero. Finally, two works that are no longer strictly speaking comics, "L’Archiviste" by Schuiten and Peeters (1984) and "Le livre des livres" by Marc-Antoine Mathieu (2017), offer collections of vertiginous possible comic worlds. For these incomplete, undeveloped worlds, fictional immersion is only suggested - the reader may be frustrated or relieved to escape the danger of fiction.

En vertu de différences concernant la conception de la nature de la fiction et de ses éléments constitutfs on rencontre une acceptation plus ou moins développée ou au contraire un rejet de la fiction narrative et de son ontologie. Le cas semble très différent lorsqu'il s'agit de fictions dites juridiquest ou plus largement normatives. Cette différence est toutefois trompeuse. Les fiction normatives sont généralement mal analysées et utilisées ensuite sous d'autres appellation comme cela peut se voir actuellement avec l'attribution de personnalité à des entité "naturelles" comme des rivières ou des montagnes. On montrera que la peur ou le rejet de la ficiton plus exactement identifiée se retrouve dans les domaines les plus divers.