French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Schulte Nordholt and P. J. Smith (eds.), Jeux de mots – enjeux littéraires, de François Rabelais à Richard Millet. Essays in Honour of Sjef Houppermans
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics
Annelies Schulte Nordholt and Paul J. Smith (eds.),
Jeux de mots – enjeux littéraires, de François Rabelais à Richard Millet. Essays in Honour of Sjef Houppermans,
Brill | Rodopi, "Faux Titre" series, 2018. EAN13: 9789004352629.
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Jeux de mots celebrates the creative power of wordplay in literature from Rabelais to the present day. Puns, portmanteau words, witticisms, neologisms, fetish words: this collective volume focuses on literary wordplay in fields as diverse as literary onomastics and constrained writing, in both prose and poetry. The specialist studies gathered here demonstrate how, from Rabelais to Richard Millet via Roussel and Roubaud, and from Mallarmé to Fargue via Apollinaire and nonsense verse, prose and poetry explore the productivity of words, their power of metamorphosis, and their capacity to shift meaning infinitely. The volume concludes with an opening onto wordplay in philosophy and cinema.
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Table of Contents:
Annelies Schulte Nordholt, Introduction: When Words Make Love
I. Play in Literary Onomastics
Richard Millet, The Glory of the Name
Sjef Houppermans, Un né de goupil (on Richard Millet)
Angela Moorjani, Proustian Masquerades: “I” or “not-I”?
Paul J. Smith, Variations on the Name of Rabelais
Franc Schuerewegen, Of Beds, Cowherds, Shakespeare, and Ernst Kantorowicz
II. Play with Lexicon and Register
Luc Fraisse, “It’s a horrible word. It’s enough to make your wisdom teeth fall out.” Fetish Words and Hated Words in Proust’s Language
Jan Baetens, “Perhaps I am not a poet…” (on Léon-Paul Fargue)
Mireille Calle Gruber, The Right Word: On Princesse Vieille Reine by Pascal Quignard
Sabine van Wesemael, A War of Languages, or How Lydie Salvayre Engages in a Struggle Against Stereotypes
III. Constrained Writing and Prose
Hermes Salceda, Raymond Roussel’s Evolved Method: Becoming-Machine Through Language
Manet van Montfrans, Wordplay, Places of Memory: On Parc Sauvage and Other Short Stories by Jacques Roubaud
Annelies Schulte Nordholt, Perec, the Chartrédalle, and the "plate bosse"
IV. Poetic Constraints
Johan Rooryck, Mallarmé’s Sonnet in X: Phonological Nothingness and Syntactic Shimmer
Nicolaas van Toorn, Apollinaire’s Monostich, or the Contortions of a Solitary Line
Wim Tigges, Prosody as Field of Play: A Neglected Issue in the Translation of Nonsense Verse
V. Beyond Literary Discourse
Alicia Montoya, From Caterpillars to Butterflies: A Primal Scene of Children’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century
Bruno Clément, A Pun by Bergson
Peter Verstraeten, Odd Men In: Intouchables
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This collective volume examines the creative power of wordplay across various genres, including prose and poetry, through specialized studies ranging from literary onomastics to constrained writing. The contributions analyze how texts engage with puns, neologisms, and shifting meanings, connecting figures like François Rabelais, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Raymond Roussel with contemporary writers such as Richard Millet and Lydie Salvayre. By investigating the lexical and stylistic dimensions of language, the essays highlight the capacity of words to undergo metamorphosis and generate new literary structures within these traditions.
Academic inquiry into stylistic experimentation and ludic forms in literature frequently addresses the intersections of rhetoric, constraints, and translation across historical periods. Readers interested in the dynamics of poetic language, textual metamorphosis, and the broader traditions of literary play may find this volume a relevant point of reference. The collection situates itself within ongoing critical discussions concerning the limits of representation, lexical features, and the philosophical implications of humor and wordplay in both textual and visual media.