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Résumé :
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The first English translation of essays from one of the twentieth century?s most intriguing avant-garde writers Compiled from two volumes of Raymond Queneau?s essays (Bâtons, chiffres et lettres and Le Voyage en Grèce), these selections find Queneau at his most playful and at his most serious, eloquently pleading for a certain classicism even as he reveals the roots of his own wildly original oeuvre. Ranging from the funny to the furious, they follow Queneau from modernism to postmodernism by way of countless captivating detours, including his thoughts on language, literary fashions, myth, politics, poetry, and other writers, such as William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, and Marcel Proust. The first English translation of essays from one of the twentieth century's most intriguing avant-garde writers, this collection provides readers access to the fascinating range of Queneau?s outlook and thinking: his fervent idealism, his encyclopedic curiosity, his tempestuous relationship with surrealism, and his frustration with conventional French grammar and spelling. In going beyond Queneau the novelist with these selections, translator Jordan Stump reveals another Queneau, one alive with intricate contradictions. Stump?s introduction and explanatory notes about Queneau and other key figures and concepts guide the reader through an ever-evolving portrait of one of the twentieth century?s most restless writers and thinkers.
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