Le jeu de la sémiose. L’humour comme opération sémiotique ludique dans Cent mille milliards de poèmes de Raymond Queneau
The Game of Semiosis. Humor as a Playful Semiotic Operation in Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes

Summary/Abstract: What is the value of play for a reader when the literary text itself is radically conceived as a ludic device? The Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle’s flagship product, Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a collection of combinatory poems, is an exemplary interrogation of reading, in view of the double problematic it raises: auctorial effacement and lectorial activity. The aim of this article is to pave the way for an epistemological re-qualification of the notion of humour, by approaching it as a (playful) practice of making sense, and more specifically here as an interpretative practice. Based on a dialectical conception of play, inherited from Kant’s “free play of the faculties”, it is intended as an opportunity for an unusual rapprochement between humour and literary reading. With the author’s ambivalent complicity, the reader’s own staging merges with the work’s semiosis.

• Details
• Contents