Adapted Voices: Tranpositions of Celine's 'Voyage au bout de la nuit' and Queneau's 'Zazie dans le metro'

Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961), and Zazie dans le métro (1959), by Raymond Queneau (1903-1976), were two revolutionary novels in their transposition of spoken language into written language. Since their publication they have been adapted into a broad range of media, including illustrated novel, bande dessinée, film, stage performance and recorded reading. What happens to their striking literary voices as they are transposed into media that combine text and image, sound and image, or consist of sound alone? In this study, Armelle Blin-Rolland examines adaptations sparked by these two seminal novels to understand what voice means in each medium, and its importance in the process of adaptation.