The impact of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle), one
of the most important groups of experimental writers of the late
twentieth century, is still being felt in contemporary literature,
criticism, and theory, both in Europe and the US. Founded in 1960
and still active today, this Parisian literary workshop has
featured among its members such notable writers as Italo Calvino,
Georges Perec, and Raymond Queneau, all sharing in its
light-hearted, slightly boozy bonhomie, the convivial antithesis of
the fractious, volatile coteries of the early twentieth-century
avant-garde. For the last fifty years the Oulipo has undertaken the
same simple goal: to investigate the potential of 'constraints' in
the production of literature-that is, formal procedures such as
anagrams, acrostics, lipograms (texts which exclude a certain
letter), and other strange and complex devices. Yet, far from being
mere parlour games, these methods have been frequently used as part
of a passionate-though sometimes satirical-involvement with the
major intellectual currents of the mid-twentieth century.
Structuralism, psychoanalysis, Surrealism, analytic philosophy: all
come under discussion in the group's meetings, and all find their
way in the group's exercises in ways that, while often ironic, are
also highly informed. Using meeting minutes, correspondence, and
other material from the Oulipo archive at the Bibliotheque
nationale de France, The Oulipo and Modern Thought shows how the
group have used constrained writing as means of puckish engagement
with the debates of their peers, and how, as the broader
intellectual landscape altered, so too would the group's conception
of what constrained writing can achieve.
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