Poetry and Cosmology--Science in the Writing of Queneau and Ponge

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback
• Published by: Rodopi 1999
• ASIN: B000V95YNS

Product Description
Wordplay and the Contextual Circle in Queneau's Petite Cosmogonie Portative Chris Andrews The University of Melbourne Published in 1950, Raymond Queneau's Petite Cosmogonie Portative was an ambitious attempt to revive the long-dormant genre of the verse cosmogony, incorporating the most recent scientific discoveries of the day and employing a ludic rhetoric indebted to the surrealists and to James Joyce. This article will propose a taxonomy to account for the bewildering variety of portmanteau words and puns in the Cosmogonie, then show how in many cases Queneau's wordplay confounds categorization by combining the proposed types. Moreover, instances of wordplay are linked in complex networks, so that the discovery of a new meaning in one instance enriches the context for the others, leading to a dizzying proliferation of meanings and making the distinction between over-reading and exhaustive reading particularly difficult to draw. Like Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the Petite Cosmogonie Portative is a text that illustrates this problem of the "contextual circle" with exemplary force. The article will conclude by relating the effects of wordplay at the lexical level to the broader reorganization of scientific knowledge effected by the Cosmogonie as a whole, and evaluating the metaphor of "transmutation" which Queneau used to describe this process. We can begin to measure the project of the Petite Cosmogonie Portative by considering its title. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a cosmogony is a "theory, system or account of the creation or generation of the universe." Diachronic cosmogony may be opposed to the synchronic systems constructed by cosmology. Queneau's poem recounts the history of the universe from the Big Bang to the invention