Word: queneau
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...while exploring the peripheries of language. But it was not until 1960 that the newly formed OuLiPo officiated at the shotgun wedding of science and literature. Its first and still most remarkable product was Cent Milie Milliards de Poems (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), written by the late Raymond Queneau, a novelist (Zazie dans le Metro) and co-founder of OuLiPo. The book consists of ten sonnets, ingeniously sliced into 14 strips. By flipping the strips left or right, the reader can construct 1014 intelligible poems. OuLiPo's lunatic fringework also included spoonerisms-deliberate slips of the tongue that...
Died. Raymond Queneau, 73, influential avant-garde author whose linguistic pyrotechnics on everyday themes helped transform modern French fiction; in Paris. Trained in logic, psychoanalysis, mathematics and philosophy, Queneau wrote scores of poems and novels, including Zazie dans le Metro, a 1959 bestseller about the Rabelaisian exploits of an eleven-year-old nymph...
...clumps of mud and orange peel, highly insured, decorate half the bon bourgeois salons of Paris. The author of many eloquent tracts, he speaks in defense of incoherence and illiteracy as poetic principles. An intellectual, Cartesian to the fingertips and a close friend of such literary eminences as Raymond Queneau, Jean Paulhan and FranÇois Ponge, he has based 30 years of work on the premise that Western culture is a grotesque irrelevancy. Dubuffet is indeed a quintessentially French figure...
Parisian Pollyanna. A national institution since she burst on the Seine in a 1959 bestselling novel, Zazie has become almost as influential as Colette's Gigi at the height of La Belle Epoque. Critics have compared Zazie's creator-Raymond Queneau, a distinguished poet and chief reader at the Gallimard publishing house-to Flaubert, Stendhal, Hugo and Hegel. (One angry dissenter: Nobel Prize Laureate François Mauriac...
...reasons for Zazie's serious appeal to critics are complex. For one thing, Author Queneau, a onetime surrealist deeply concerned with language, tries to close the gap between literary and spoken speech in the Zazie novel, runs words together and sometimes employs phonetic spellings. Others see in Zazie a device of savage social satire. Says New Wave Movie Director Louis (Les Amants) Malle: "She's actually the angel come to announce the destruction of Babylon." Still others have compared her to everyone from Joan of Arc (defending popular virtues against monarchists with Napoleonic delusions) to Lolita. In fact...