Product Description
Tonneaux à fonds perdus propose une étude comparative des structures langagières dans les écrits de Rabelais et Queneau, à la lumière des concepts du carnavalesque et du tiers-espace. Cette recherche se base sur les théories de Barthes, Derrida et Bakhtine et étudie les niveaux multiples des textes de Rabelais et Queneau en analysant leurs styles, les expressions idiomatiques person-nalisées, l’intertextualité et leur réinvention des personnages en tant que signes linguistiques. Les notions de carnavalesque et de tiers-espace permettent de prouver que les deux auteurs offrent un discours à fin-ouverte qui déconstruit ce que nous acceptons en tant que narratologie conventionnelle, en montrant que les caracté-ristiques de leurs textes participent de l’esprit carnavalesque et s’ouvrent ainsi sur un tiers-espace qui est un commentaire sur la poétique de subversion littéraire. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A 20th c. 'Don Quixote'- a big,fat, fantastic, comic novel
Raymond Queneau's works are generally circumscribed in scope, with a small cast of characters and restricted, usually Parisian settings.Their vastness comes from a philosophical play with time, and a casual use of recondite allusion.'Children of Clay', however,is quite literally encyclopaedic.In the early 1930s, Queneau compiled an anthology of 19th century literary lunatics (cranks, conspiracy theorists, alternative semioticians, cosmologists etc.), which failed to find a publisher.This novel features a provincial, aristocratic headmaster who researches and compiles such an encyclopaedia, huge, dizzying chunks of which prop up the novel, hatstand versions of the universe's beginning jostling with paranoid accounts of what really happened in French history.

'Children of Clay' is many other things too.It is a huge historical novel, set in the France of the late 1920s and early 30s, with the Stock Market Crash, the decline of the aristocracy and the giant industrialists, working class unrest, anti-Semitism, the rise of fascism.The large dramatis personae include the Hachamoth family, the Jewish Baron and his extreme Catholic wife, her foppish younger brother, her beautiful daughters and religious zealot son; Clemence, their disfigured maid; the Gramignis, refugees from Fascist Italy; Robert Bossu, a barowner's son, convinced of his impending greatness in the new France; Chambernac himself, an inept sexual transgressor, who, in a reverse of the Faust story, forces a devil to sign a contract to help him complete his encyclopaedia.

Mirroring his madmen's cosmologies, all these characters ultimately descend from one man, Claye, only glimpsed in one paragraph, committing suicide from a plane.The novel is full of parodic Biblical allusions and restagings (the children of Claye are also the children of clay, i.e. all Mankind), as characters struggle to live in a violent, evil world that God has seemingly abdicated.The novel ranges in space from Italy to the English Channel, by way of the Riviera and Paris, and in time from the French Revolutionto the rise of European fascism; or, more precisely, from the creation of the world to, perhaps, its imminent demise.

'Children' is one of those huge, counter-encyclopaedias, like Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy', Swift's 'Tale of the Tub', Melville's 'Moby Dick' or Benjamin's 'Arcades', works that gather together masses of alternative knowledge, marginal, ephemeral, 'useless', trivial, rubbish, countering the encyclopaedic ambition to totalise and classify and explain life.by focusing on what seems unimportant, even mad, these works are perversely never complete, spiralling endlessly, creating a counter-knowledge that can make life, the world, the universe, seem vertiginously new and inexhaustible.

There is somuch going on in 'Children', it might be overpowering if it wasn't written in crisp, sprightly, ironic, elliptical comic prose.The novel is contemporary with Marcel Carne's poetic realist films that seemed to prevision the Fall of France, and it shares their profound pessimism, but instead of suffocating in dead ends, Queneau offers us a dazzling collage of possibilities, different ways of looking at the world, all bonkers, but as we try to find a way out of the mess produced by prevailing mindsets, than maybe we could do with a little madness.

A Worthy Read
While this volume is a difficult read, it is at once tragic yet humourous; thought-provoking yet full of madness; fantasic yet realistic.Anyone who enjoys a though provoking book, touching on almost all aspects of life will enjoy this book.

disappointing madness
Anything by Queneau attracts attention, but this was dissappointing, and hard work to get to the end. The plot, unusually, meanders or is obscure - a thin technique to print the mad scientists' manuscripts that clog up thetext.

Children of Clay
Children of Clay offers the Master of Literary Illusion's greatest irony, but it ultimately remains unclear if this was Queneau's intention. A principal character in the story, a Monsieur Chambernac, has made it his life's obsession to exhume and bring to light, in a bibliographicencyclopeadia, the works and lives of a collection of obscure, mostlyself-published, largely unreadable, delusional 19th century French writers,who have in common only that no interest has ever been taken in their work.M. Chambernac refers to his subject matter as the "literarylunatics." In the end, Chambernac is unable to find a publisher andfails to generate any interest at all in his esoteric encyclopaedia.Answering his own criteria for inclusion in the ranks of literary lunatics,he abandons his manuscript to an unknown author, named Queneau, whorequests permission to incorporate the material into a novel he is writing. In fact, as we learn from the introduction, Queneau himselfpainstakingly researched this material for a similar undertaking and unableto interest a publisher in it, constructed this novel around it in order toget the material into print. As always, Queneau's writing is clever andentertaining, but the various characters and sub-plots fail to cohereadequately to justify the novel form. ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, Eugène Ionesco, Alfred Jarry, Boris Vian, Raymond Queneau, Fernando Arrabal, Jean Baudrillard, Jean Dubuffet, Roger Grenier, Jean Lescure, Gail Thacker, Luc Etienne Périn, Brian Reffin Smith, Julien Torma, Paul Fournel, Stanley Chapman, François le Lionnais, Frank Ténot. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 123. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Marcel Duchamp (28 July 1887 2 October 1968; French pronunciation: ) was a French/American artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art. He advised modern art collectors, such as Peggy Guggenheim and other prominent figures, thereby helping to shape the tastes of Western art during this period. A playful man, Duchamp challenged conventional thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much by writing, but through subversive actions such as dubbing a urinal art and naming it Fountain. He produced relatively few artworks, while moving quickly through the avant-garde circles of his time. "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act." Marcel Duchamp was born in Blainville-Crevon Seine-Maritime in the Haute-Normandie region of France, and grew up in a family that enjoyed cultural activities. The art of painter and engraver Emile Nicolle, his maternal grandfather, filled the house, and the family liked to play chess, read books, paint, and make music together. Three Duchamp brothers, left to right: Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon in the garden of Jacques Villon's studio in P...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=42650 ... Read more

Product Description
De Le Chiendent et Zazie dans le mÉtro jusqu'À Les Fleurs bleues, Le Vol d'Icare et Morale ÉlÉmentaire, l'oeuvre de Raymond Queneau, difficilement classable, transgÉnÉrique, transgressive, ne cesse de bousculer normes, modes, traditions. Consciemment rÉbarbative et richement crÉatrice À la fois, elle installe une poÉtique multivoque du dÉfi et de la rÉvolte, du sourire et de l'ironie, de la rÉcupÉration et de l'amour, mÊme. Toutes les "questions de style" vÉhiculent spectralement, mais lucidement, ce que l'on pourrait appeler des questions d'existence. OralitÉ, archaÏsmes, nÉologismes, intertextualitÉs, parodies, tout tÉmoigne de la riche fascination de la langue, sa profondeur, sa multiplicitÉ, son devenir, sa pratique miroitante, sa thÉorie ou philosophie À la fois gÉnÉralisable et provisoire, relative, les questions de sens et d'absurde qui la soustendent, les splendeurs imbriquÉes d'un vÉcu et d'un imaginaire qu'elle persiste simultanÉment À multiplier et À interroger. L'Étude de Carol Sanders, judicieuse, centrÉe, ÉlÉgante, tout en permettant de pÉnÉtrer dans l'intime complexitÉ d'un travail des plus conscients au niveau de la langue, rÉussit aussi À en souligner toute la pertinence dÉlicatement ontologique.
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Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, published by Review of Contemporary Fiction on September 22, 1997. The length of the article is 4206 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: The writings of Raymond Queneau are exemplified by the 1939 novel 'A Hard Winter,' and the novel is recommended as a starting point for novices to navigate through Queneau's large body of work. The story depicts a man overcoming his hate of the world and serves as an example of a rite of passage theme central to so many of Queneau's works.

Citation Details
Title: "Interludes" from Raymond Queneau.
Author: Jacques Jouet
Publication: The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 1997
Publisher: Review of Contemporary Fiction
Volume: v17Issue: n3Page: p54(10)

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