How to (mis)use language: humor, creativity and lexical creation in Rikki Ducornet’s The Stain, The Fountains of Neptune and Phosphor in Dreamland

Abstract

This article questions the link between creativity, lexical creation and humor in literary texts, more specifically in three of Rikki Ducornet’s novels: The Stain, The Fountains of Neptune and Phosphor in Dreamland. The literary text is a privileged space for linguistic experimentation and particularly for literary creation, which takes the form of tropes and figures of speech which question the relation between sign and meaning. Rikki Ducornet’s novels use both lexical creation and literary creativity to create humor, as they rely on long-lasting literary traditions such as Lewis Carroll’s nonsense and Rabelais’ carnivalesque. Her novels show the powerful link between lexical creation, fictional creativity and humor; this article will study the modalities and the consequences of this link.

Keywords

• onomastics
• lexical creation
• puns
• nonsense
• carnivalesque
• comic relief