Queneau S Fiction

A general study of Queneau in English, originally published in 1985, which offers a straightforward introduction to his novels and short stories.

In this delightful, cinema-inspired daydream of a novel, an identity-shifting protagonist uses the everyday inspirations of his life to catapult himself into the realm of imagination, blurring the boundaries between reality and fantasy. The Skin of Dreams is a novel of waking dreams. Even as he lives his life, Jacques L’Aumône, its hero, daydreams a hundred other possible lives. A few lines on a page, a chance encounter, a remark overheard in passing, any of these are enough to kick things into gear and send him off outside of himself to become a boxer, a general, a bishop, or a lord. He lives alongside his life with diligence and steadfastness; and the passage from real to dream is so natural for him that he no longer knows precisely which him he is. Eventually he becomes an actor in Hollywood, and the basis of countless dreams for others. This Jacques L’Aumône, like the characters who surround him, has the same sort of haunting and fluid consistency as someone that we might dream of in our beds at night. And reverie, here, is born through the tale’s humor, which is as gentle as it is cruel, as well as by way of a writing technique that is itself drawn from one of Queneau’s great loves, the cinema.

A very funny book with great charm. The Times..This first English translation of The Sunday of Life is excellent. The Financial Times

Translations are crucial to the flow of themes, images, forms and ideas across boundaries. They constitute a special case of cultural dynamics as, in a sense, they are existing texts revived in a new form. The introduction of textual works in a target culture involves a high degree of strategy and control. These moments of control, selection and influence deserve special attention in cultural, receptional, and translation-historical studies. The essays in this yearbook address aspects of the central topic: the impact of translations on cultural-historical developments in Europe. First and foremost is the question which works were selected and why, and next which were neglected and why. In a wider scope: what - in the long-term processes of cultural transfer - were the «peaks» or key moments, and of which nature was the discourse accompanying the presence of a foreign-language culture in translation? Why did it all happen like this, and what was the precise impact of the introduction of new works, new ideas, new culture through the medium of translation? These are the questions to which the authors of this work attempt to provide answers. Les traductions ont une importance cruciale quant à la circulation des thèmes, des images, des formes et des idées au-delà des frontières. Elles représentent un cas particulier de dynamique culturelle, insufflant en un sens une nouvelle vie à des textes existant. L'introduction d'oeuvres écrites dans une culture cible suppose un déploiement important de stratégies visant à contrôler ces processus, qui font l'objet d'une attention toute particulière dans les études d'histoire culturelle, de réception, et d'histoire de la traduction. Les études contenues dans ce volume s'intéressent aux différents aspects du sujet principal : l'impact des traductions sur les développements historiques et culturels en Europe. Tout d'abord quelles sont les oeuvres retenues, pourquoi celles-ci et non pas d'autres ? Plus généralement, les auteurs s'intéressent aux moments où l'influence a atteint un apogée dans les processus à longue échéance des transferts culturels et à la nature du discours accompagnant la présence sous forme de traduction d'une culture en langue étrangère. Pourquoi tout cela est-il arrivé de la sorte et quel est l'impact précis de l'introduction d'oeuvres, d'idées, d'une culture nouvelles à travers le medium de la traduction ? Voilà dans tous les cas les questions clés auxquelles les auteurs de cet ouvrage entendent répondre.

A "novel written in the form of a play: seventy-four short scenes, complete with stage directions ... It begins with a novelist's discovery that his principal character, Icarus by name, has vanished ... Before long, a number of desperate authors are found in search of their fugitive characters, who wander through the Paris of the 1890s, occaionally meeting one another, and even straying into new novels."--Back cover.

Although the self-definition of Surrealism and the initial defining of science fiction as a genre both took place in the 1920s and the links between the two are manifest, no full study has appeared till now on Surrealism and SF. Across ten original essays, Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics looks at how the Surrealist movement in France and the USA used, informed, contributed to, and criticised SF from that moment, whilst including discussion of the related genre of comics. Among its aims are a reassessment of Jules Verne in the light of Surrealism and an analysis of the debate in the 1950s on the 'new' Anglo-American literature arriving in France. This received, in fact, a mixed reception from the Surrealists of that decade even though writers and intellectuals close to the movement in the 1920s were directly responsible for its success. The book includes further essays on the subsequent impact of Surrealism on SF novelists J.G. Ballard and Alan Burns, and features essays that argue for Salvador Dalí's closeness to SF in the 1960s and his disagreement with the earlier scientific romance defined by Verne. The chapters that bring in comics range from theoretical discussions of the relation between the original comic strips of Rodolphe Töpffer and the key Surrealist technique of automatism, used in art and writing, through the cybernetic implications of the proto-SF Surrealist ciné-roman 'M. Wzz...' of 1929, which has never discussed in any detail before, to the 1948 Vache paintings by René Magritte, inspired by Louis Forton's strip Les Pieds nickelés. This pioneering set of essays shows how Surrealism from the 1920s to the 1970s did not just receive and adapt SF but impacted the genre in its later manifestations.