French Literature Reviews - 2026
A.-S. Bories, Des Chiffres et des mètres. La versification de Raymond Queneau
Poetry and Poetics
Anne-Sophie Bories,
Des Chiffres et des mètres. La versification de Raymond Queneau,
Honoré Champion, "Lettres numériques" series, 2020.
276 pages
35 Eur
Is it possible to capture an author's unique touch, to hold it in one's hands and see how it is made? It is a tall order, especially in the case of a poet as eclectic as Raymond Queneau, whose poems, at once solemn and comical, charm the reader and disconcert them with their variety of tones, forms, and subjects, from 'little pigeons full of fantasy' to the 'mortuary beetle nibbling at the dead'.
To decipher the seemingly scattered style of the founder of Oulipo, the author uses a vast database for the precise analysis of all his verses, representing 404,741 data points on 15,996 lines. This quantitative approach, offering a distant reading of metrical phenomena, is closely combined with meticulous close reading to produce a multifocal understanding of the poems. The study of versification thus serves as a springboard for interpreting a major poetic work, whose playful side both masks and reveals an implacably lucid sincerity.
Anne-Sophie Bories holds a PhD from Université Paris 3. She is a former visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Leeds, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Basel, and an associate member of the ATILF-CNRS laboratory. In particular, she co-organized the first three editions of the annual conference "Machiner la poésie – Plotting Poetry" in Basel (2017), Berlin (2018), and Nancy (2019).
Raymond Queneau occupies a singular position in twentieth-century French literature, notably as a founding figure of the Oulipo group, where formal constraints and mathematical structures became central to literary creation. The broader tradition of French versification encompasses centuries of codification regarding meter, rhyme, and stanzaic forms, serving as a vital backdrop for poets who sought both to inherit and subvert classical rules. Critical approaches to such corpuses have increasingly embraced digital humanities methods alongside traditional stylistic analysis, allowing researchers to examine large volumes of metrical data while remaining attentive to the nuances of individual poems and the stylistic breadth characteristic of modern poetic production.
In Des Chiffres et des mètres. La versification de Raymond Queneau, Anne-Sophie Bories examines the poetic practice of the author by using a vast database for the precise analysis of all his verses, representing 404,741 data points on 15,996 lines. This quantitative approach, offering a distant reading of metrical phenomena, is closely combined with close reading to produce a multifocal understanding of the poems. The study of versification thus serves as a springboard for interpreting a major poetic work, whose playful side both masks and reveals an implacably lucid sincerity. Readers interested in contemporary approaches to poetry and the formal analysis of twentieth-century verse may find the volume relevant to their inquiries.