A Worldwide Web of Words: Queneau Redux

The analogy of a réseau or network is one of the most powerful of our age and, while often represented as a neat set of interconnections with all points linked to others in geometrical patterns, the reality can be quite different: more useful is the Rhizome analogy, modelled on plants such as orchids and bamboo, with no centres and no defined boundaries; the Internet, for example, is a profoundly rhizomatic structure. The analysis presented is that of a 'traditional' printed text, Raymond Queneau's Exercices de style, itself a study in rewriting, and examines the ST within its intertextual web, touching on its interlingual translations into English and Italian, its intersemiotic translations into song, comic book and theatre work, and some of the countless paratextual elements surrounding the Exercices, with the ultimate objective of analysing how all these elements cannot but now influence our reception of the original source text.