A remarkable collection of writings by members of the group known as Oulipo, this anthology includes, among others, Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubad, and Raymond Queneau. Founded in Paris in 1960, Oulipo approaches writing in a way that has yet to make its impact in the United States and its creative writing programs. Rather than inspiration, rather than experience, rather than self-expression, the Oulipans view imaginative writing as an exercise dominated by the method of "constraints." While a major contribution to literary theory, Oulipo is perhaps most distinguished as an indispensable guide to writers.
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"This reader is truly impressed by Motte's capacity to present, in a clear fashion, material that is still new and 'difficult' to most of his readership." -- Jean-Jacques Thomas, South Atlantic Review 5-88
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Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French
Original Language: French
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67 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Oulipo - The American Book Review,
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This review is from: Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Paperback)
Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all of its imaginable permutations, Tlon, Uglor, Orbiris, Tertius - Jorge Louis Borges Warren F. Motte has collected a series of critical writing from The Ouvrior de Litterature Potentielle or Oulipo (The Workshop of Potential Literature), a primarily French group organized around Raymond Queneau and primarily concerned with methods of creating new literary structures. Their ideas offer a welcome relief to the staid and stale conviction that literary forms have been handed down from the ancients along with the rest of language, as if structures like sonnets or mystery novels are as intrinsically a part of language as vowels or nouns. These essays illuminate the limited ways that contemporary fiction approaches the idea of form. In the limited framework of the short story structure, readers find great variation and even invention, but the actual form of the story seems as rigid a language structure as the blues are a song structure, tirelessly repeating the AAB structure into infinity; I asked my captain for the time of day. I asked my captain for the time of day. He said hed thrown his watch away. A writer who wants to be free needs to confront the constrictions and value of literary form. Yet, literary form seems to come out of a black box, so much so that writing that somehow confounds formats, like Lawrence Sternes Tristam Shandy or Edwin A. Abbotts Flatland or more recently Ben Marcuss The Age of Wire and String seems to be inspired but frivolous oddities rather than the result of a literary method. The Oulipo, however, have developed a method for subverting expectations and for being as creative with form as writers are expected to be with content. Franáois Le Lionnais writes in the Second Oulipo Manifesto, Should humanity lie back and be satisfied to watch new thoughts make ancient verses? Literature that satisfies a particular form fulfills the esthetic aims of that form. For instance, the novel developed several hundred years ago as a result of an expanded middle class audience. The form typically follows a protagonists conflict with society and in the end the protagonist either achieves some kind of reconciliation with society or dies; the form of the novel performs as both a platform for an anarchic point of view but also reassures its audience that eccentricity will be absorbed in the end. A sonnet straps language into iambic pentameter, a straight jacket rhyme scheme, and limits the subject to a single sentiment. The Poetry Handbook includes this rule for the sonnet, Groups of sonnets using the same form and relate to the same theme, which is often love of a women or the love of God. The inherent value of the form exerts a hidden force on the content of the work. Form functions like a medium and in this sense limits the range of meaning expressed by language just as wood grain limits the direction of the carved line in a wood block. By building mazes and trying to escape them, the Oulipo have started a dialogue about ways to imagine new literary structures. By building artificial rules the Oulipo have escaped the prison of old forms. Founded in late 1960 in France, at a colloquium on the work of Raymond Queneau, in order to research new writing by combining mathematics and literature (and also to just horse around) the Oulipo soon expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems. The group didnt publicly publish until 1973, La Litterature Potentielle. The best known of the groups work are Italo Calvinos If on a winters night a traveler and Georges Perecs Life: A Users Manual. A truncated role call of the more familiar names includes: Noël Arnaud, Italo Calvino, Ross Chambers, Stanley Chapman, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Fournal, Franáois Le Lionnais, Harry Matthews, Georges Perec, and Raymond Queneau. Oulipo contains the critical writings of the Oulipo, including Franáois Le Lionnaiss Manifestoes, a history of the Lipogram by Georges Perec, and Jacques Roulaurds explanation of the mathematical method of Raymond Queneau. Reading the critical writing gives a foundation in the method and the nature of the groups experiment. Jean Lescures Brief History of the Oulipo chronicles the formulation of the group as an formally informal gathering of mathematicians and writers who began to apply mathematical formulas to literary forms. The end matter of the book contains a thorough bibliography of the principal Oulipo players and their work. Raymond Queneaus Cent Mille Millards de Poems (One hundred thousand billion poems), expresses the Oulipian ideal. It is a series of ten sonnets contrived so that each line of each sonnet can be replaced with any corresponding line of the other ten sonnets, sort of like a sonnet version of one of those childrens flip-books where you can change the head of animals. The possibilities put forth by this arrangement would be to the order of 1014, one hundred trillion sonnets. The potential text explodes into an incomprehensible size. According to [Queneaus] calculations, if one read a sonnet per minute eight hours a day, two hundred days per year, it would take more than a million centuries to finish the text. The Oulipo seem to be most interested in discovering how to express literature by limiting the writers choices, either by the construction of mathematical formulas that produce results, formal constraints and rules that produces results, or language games that produce results, in this sense I mean results as in the result of an equation. The lipogram, where a single letter is stricken from the text, is an ancient exercise the Oulipians have appropriated for their toolbox. Ideally, each Oulipian structure would result in one potential literature, not necessarily a single text because The One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems is a single potential literature, but nearly an infinite text. For a writer, drafting an Oulipian work should be more like filling out a crossword puzzle or doing calculus homework then an act of inspiration. The muse has had her hard drive reformatted and inspiration is not to be trusted. To practitioners approaching writing as a craft, as if the writing of stories was along the lines of knitting sweaters, this exploration seems at best frivolous and maybe a little pretentious if all you want to do is make sweaters. However, these are useful generative tools. Not only do they provide a developed handbag of new literary forms, but these tools also establish a solid framework for developing a criticism about literary structure. This book is a vital and concise introduction to the Oulipian technique.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It does a good job at breaking down a convoluted subject,
By Zelie Nic (Pittsburgh) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Paperback)
Most people who purchase this book are probably English majors or academics. I picked this book up because I'm interested in the subject of Oulipo and its connections to 'apaphysics. Indeed, the forward to this book talks about how Oulipo began as an offshoot of 'apaphysics but, shortly after, lost any official ties with the aforementioned group.
Oulipo is a bit difficult to wrap your head around at first. It is a relatively new movement in French literature. It is not merely a collection of structualists (although an exception is made for Claude Levi-Strauss). The best definition for Oulipo that I can give you from what I've learned by reading this book is this: Oulipo is a workshop of writers who strive to create new forms of writing, based upon restrictions... constraints. They create a new form, provide a few examples, and move on. How is this potential literature? A good example is "Cent Mille Milliard de poemes" or, in English "One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems." The collection itself is only ten sonnets... but each line can be cut&pasted into any of the other sonnets, which means that the number of possible poems becomes 10 to the 14th power, or One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Even the most ardent reader will only read a small handful of these poems within their lifetime. Therefore, most of the writing is, and will always be potential. Of course, this is just one form and one example. That specific example was the where it started to really click for me. I'm still deep in the book, and I highly reccommend it. It might not be the easiest book to pick-up, but like I said earlier, most anyone picking this up is probaby familiar with the writers involved in Oulipo, or has read literary criticisms and other academic texts. This is not dense like Derridie, but none-the-less, it is a very academic minded book.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Glimpse,
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This review is from: Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Paperback)
If you are curious about the inner workings of an infamous group of dedicated outcasts and writers with a passion for both elaborate and finite (read: calculated) creativity, I would suggest you get a copy of this book. I was engrossed from the beginning and kept finding historical "secrets" of these writing masters to titillate me. It was, simply, a glimpse at what is possible in writing.
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