Rewriting Greece: Queneau and the Agony of Presence

In four far-reaching assertions, Toloudis makes a new, comprehensive, statement on the meaning of the Quenellian oeuvre. In his assessment, the persona emerging from the typology of Queneau’s novelistic characters, the posturing of his fables, his conception of discourse as a sovereign game, and his conception of the literary paradigm as exercise in self-reflexivity are all manifestations of a will to discredit the force of the rational and, more broadly, to deconstruct all models of intelligibility inherited from Greece in the Western world.