Rrose Selavy was published under Duchamp’s own name, but for the title he used the name of his female alter ego. “Rrose Selavy sprang full-grown from the mind of Marcel Duchamp during the late summer or early fall of 1920. Insouciant, mocking, a bit of a slut perhaps, with her talent for elaborately salacious puns, she would lend her name to all sorts of verbal and visual Duchampian artefacts until 1941, when she quietly retired from the scene” (Tomkins p. 231). The text consists of 42 paragraphs, some several sentences long, some of just a few words—the final one, perhaps significantly, composed simply of the words “lit et rature”, Duchamp’s pun on the French for “bed and deletion.” Arturo Schwarz notes that Duchamp himself accorded the same status to his puns as his artworks:

“Two anthologies of his puns offer proof that Duchamp attributed to his word- plays the same importance he gave to his more conventional works. Rrose Selavy, a collection of puns dating from 1914 to 1939, was published in the latter year by Guy Levis-Mano, who was both a fine poet and the Surrealists’ favourite publisher. Still more significant is the fact that when in 1941 Duchamp assembled the Box in a Valise (which contained miniature replicas and repro- ductions of those of his works he deemed most meaningful), he included in this “portable museum” a four-page selection of twenty-five puns he liked best, to which he later gave the title Written wrotten (Morceaux moisis, which sounds like morceaux choisis, or “selected works”)” (Schwarz p. 88).