Raymond Queneau Reading the Newspaper

The work of Raymond Queneau, who is usually regarded as avoiding making political statements, presents a fruitful case for examining how a civilian writer critiques the transmission of news of war through formal procedures. In poems that explore civilian witnessing and reception of war news, the figure of a solitary reader hunched over a newspaper during a political crisis appears at the same time as Queneau experiments with forms drawn from classical rhetoric (like the progymnasmata, a handbook of rhetorical exercises) and with journalistic formulae (like the fait divers). Close examination of Exercices de style, along with a series of poems Queneau wrote about the Munich Agreement, reveals he developed tropes and schemes that convey obliquity, self-interruption, and repetition as ways of articulating the civilian experience and critiquing the narrative framing of war news.