| In this thesis I have undertaken a comparative study of language in the 16th century Rabelais', and 20th century Raymond Queneau's creative works. I have found that the epistemological questionings concerning literature and language implicit in Rabelais and other 16th century writers, such as Erasmus and Ariosto, are remarkably similar to those of 20th century writers such as Queneau, Robbe-Grillet, Butor, and Calvino.I consider the writings of Rabelais and Queneau to be departures from the conventional narrative in that they embody the notion of text as self. Their works also share the veneer of a conventional narrative which acts as a cloak for their experiments in linguistic theory. Both authors engage in a literary pursuit that is simultaneously practice and theory, exploring language in all of its forms, and offering a plural discourse resistant to normal interpretive procedures. In fact, their texts are non-referential to one specific meaning and present open-ended dialectics, thereby challenging the conventional narrative while paradoxically using it to do so. This irony illustrates a co-evident concept of creation as game in both authors' works and manifests itself in each writer's style through the use of an endless movement of semantic construction and deconstruction.In grounding my research in the theories of Barthes, Derrida, and Bakhtin, who have all taken a semiologic approach to literary analysis, I am further researching the various levels of Rabelais' and Queneau's works by analyzing the diversity of their styles, coined phrases, intertextuality, and their use of characters as linguistic signs. In addition to an in-depth analysis, I am incorporating Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque and that of the third-space in order to prove that the two authors offer an open-ended discourse that deconstructs what we have come to accept as conventional narrative, thus showing how the characteristics of their texts contribute to a carnivalesque spirit that opens onto a third-space which is a commentary on the poetics of literary subversion. |
