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Oulipo
Oulipo (, short for ; roughly translated as "workshop of potential literature", stylized ''OuLiPo'') is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior and Jean Lescure, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud. The group defines the term ''littérature potentielle'' as (rough translation): "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy". Queneau described Oulipians as "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape." Constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration, most notably Perec's "story-making machine", which he used in the construction of '' Life: A User's Manual''. As well as established techniques, such as lipograms (Perec's novel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ian Monk
Ian Monk (born 1960) is a British writer and translator, based in Paris, France.Ian Monk Oulipo website (retrieved 29 december 2013). Biography Since 1998, he has been a member of the French writing group Oulipo. Among his works in English are the books, ''Family Archaeology and Other Poems'' (2004) and ''Writings for the Oulipo'' (2005). His translations include several novels by Daniel Pennac, several works by his fellow Oulipian Georges Perec, and a rhymed translation of Raymond Roussel's ''New Impressions of Africa'' (''Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique''). He now writes mainly in French, but in 2015 published a bilingual, self-translated (in both directions) ebook of poetry, ''Les feuilles de yucca / Leaves of the Yucca''[...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lipogram
A lipogram (from , ''leipográmmatos'', "leaving out a letter" is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided.McArthur, Tom (1992). ''The Oxford Companion to the English Language'', p. 612. Oxford University Press. Extended Ancient Greek texts avoiding the letter sigma are the earliest examples of lipograms.Motte Jr, Warren F (1986). "Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature", pp. 100–101 University of Nebraska Press. Writing a lipogram may be a trivial task when avoiding uncommon letters like ''Z'', ''J'', ''Q'', or ''X'', but it is much more challenging to avoid Letter frequency, common letters like ''E'', ''T'', or ''A'' in the English language, as the author must omit many ordinary words. Grammatically meaningful and smooth-flowing lipograms can be difficult to compose. Identifying lipograms can also be problematic, as there is always the possibility that a given pie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
François Le Lionnais
François Le Lionnais (3 October 1901 – 13 March 1984) was a French chemical engineer and writer. He was a co-founder of the literary movement Oulipo. Biography Le Lionnais was born in Paris on 3 October 1901. Trained as a chemical engineer, he directed the Forges d'Aquiny industrial firm during the years 1928–1929. Active in the French resistance group Front National during World War II, he was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in October 1944 and spent six months (November 1944 – April 1945) as a prisoner in the Dora concentration camp. His 1946 essay “La Peinture à Dora” (“Painting in Dora”) describes his experience as a prisoner. After World War II, Le Lionnais became the director of General Studies at the École Supérieure de Guerre (now part of the École Militaire). In 1950, he became the founding head of the Division of Science Education at UNESCO. Together with the French physicist Louis de Broglie and his close friend Jacques Bergier, Le Li ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Raymond Queneau
Raymond Auguste Queneau (; ; 21 February 1903 – 25 October 1976) was a French novelist, poet, critic, editor and co-founder and president of Oulipo (), notable for his wit and cynical humour. Biography Queneau, the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot, was born at 47, rue Thiers (now Avenue René-Coty), Le Havre, Seine-Inférieure. He received his middle name Auguste as a patronymic. After studying in Le Havre, Queneau moved to Paris in 1920 and received his first baccalauréat in 1925 for philosophy from the University of Paris. Queneau performed military service as a '' zouave'' in Algeria and Morocco during the years 1925–26. From the 1920s through 1930s, Queneau took odd jobs for income, working as a bank teller, tutor, translator and hackwriting in a column entitled, ('Do you know Paris?') for the daily newspaper '' L'Intransigeant''. He married Janine Kahn (1903–1972) in 1928 after returning to Paris from his first military service. Kahn was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel Levin Becker
Daniel Levin Becker (born 1984 in Chicago) is an American writer, translator and musical critic. Life In 2006, he finished his undergraduate studies in English and French at Yale University, where he also wrote for campus humor magazine '' Yale Record''. In 2009 he was elected member of the French literary workshop Oulipo, making him the second American member of this group (the first is Harry Mathews). He was elected after a Fulbright year spent organizing and indexing that group's archives. He is the author of ''Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature,'' published in April 2012 by Harvard University Press. Levin Becker is currently the reviews editor for the magazine '' The Believer''. He also contributes regularly as a music critic for the newspaper ''SF Weekly''. His writings and musical reviews can also be regularly found in ''Dusted Magazine'', ''The Point'', and '' The American Book Review'', He is among a list of contributors to ''The &NOW Awards 2: The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jacques Roubaud
Jacques Roubaud (; 5 December 1932 – 5 December 2024) was a French poet, writer, and mathematician. Life and career Jacques Roubaud taught mathematics at University of Paris X Nanterre and poetry at EHESS. A member of the Oulipo group, he has published poetry, plays, novels, and translated English poetry and books into French, such as Lewis Carroll's ''The Hunting of the Snark''. French poet and novelist Raymond Queneau had Roubaud's first book, a collection of mathematically structured sonnets, published by Éditions Gallimard, and then invited Roubaud to join the Oulipo as the organization's first new member outside the founders.Durand, Marcella"Jacques Roubaud" ''BOMB Magazine''. Summer 2009. Retrieved 26 July 2011. Roubaud's fiction often suppresses the rigorous constraints of the Oulipo (while mentioning their suppression, thereby indicating that such constraints are indeed present), yet takes the Oulipian self-consciousness of the writing act to an extreme. This simul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
'Pataphysics
'Pataphysics () is a sardonic "philosophy of science" invented by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) intended to be a parody of science. Difficult to be simply defined or pinned down, it has been described as the "science of imaginary solutions". Introduction 'Pataphysics was a concept expressed by Jarry in a mock-scientific manner, with undertones of spoofing and quackery, as expounded in his novel '' Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician''. Here, Jarry toyed with conventional concepts and interpretations of reality. Another attempt at a definition interprets 'pataphysics as an idea that "the virtual or imaginary nature of things as glimpsed by the heightened vision of poetry or science or love can be seized and lived as real". Jarry defines 'pataphysics in a number of statements and examples, including that it is "the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino (, ; ;. RAI (circa 1970), retrieved 25 October 2012. 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian novelist and short story writer. His best-known works include the ''Our Ancestors'' trilogy (1952–1959), the '' Cosmicomics'' collection of short stories (1965), and the novels '' Invisible Cities'' (1972) and ''If on a winter's night a traveler'' (1979). Admired in Britain, Australia and the United States, Calvino was the most translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death. He is buried in the garden cemetery of Castiglione della Pescaia in Tuscany. Biography Parents Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba, in 1923. His father, , was a tropical agronomist and botanist who also taught agriculture and floriculture. Born 47 years earlier in Sanremo, Italy, Mario Calvino had emigrated to Mexico in 1909 where he took up an important position with the Ministry of Agriculture. In an autobiographical e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Constrained Writing
Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern. Constraints are very common in poetry, which often requires the writer to use a particular verse form. Description Constraints on writing are common and can serve a variety of purposes. For example, a text may place restrictions on its vocabulary, e.g. Basic English, copula-free text, defining vocabulary for dictionaries, and other limited vocabularies for teaching English as a second language or to children. In poetry, formal constraints abound in both mainstream and experimental work. Familiar elements of poetry like rhyme and meter are often applied as constraints. Well-established verse forms like the sonnet, sestina, villanelle, limerick, and haiku are variously constrained by meter, rhyme, repetition, length, and other characteristics. Outside of established traditions, particularly in the avant-garde, writers have produced a var ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Georges Perec
Georges Perec (; 7 March 1936 – 3 March 1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holocaust. Many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play. Early life Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz. Perec's father, who enlisted in the French Army during World War II, died in 1940 from untreated gunfire or shrapnel wounds, and his mother was killed in the Holocaust, probably in Auschwitz sometime after 1943. Perec was taken into the care of his paternal aunt and uncle in 1942, and in 1945, he was formally adopted by them. Career Perec started writing reviews and essays for ''La Nouvelle Revue français ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oskar Pastior
Oskar Pastior (; 20 October 1927 – 4 October 2006) was a Romanian-born German poet and translator. He was the only German member of Oulipo. Biography Born into a Transylvanian Saxon family in Sibiu (Hermannstadt) in the Kingdom of Romania, he was deported in January 1945, along with many other ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe, to the USSR for forced labor. He returned to Romania in 1949, and went on to study German studies at the University of Bucharest in 1955. After graduation, he worked for the German language service of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company. In 1964, he published his first collection of poems, "Offne Worte". After having been under surveillance by the Securitate for 4 years, Pastior became an informer for the Securitate in 1961 with the alias "Otto Stein". This became known in 2010, years after his death. He was an informer until 1968, when he obtained a scholarship to Vienna and defected from Communist Romania. Pastior left for Germany, living at firs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean Lescure
Jean Lescure (; 14 September 1912 – 17 October 2005) was a French poet. Biography Lescure was born in Asnières-sur-Seine. In 1938, he published his first plaquette of poems, "Le voyage immobile", and launched the review "Messages" (two issues in 1939: "William Blake" and "Metaphysics and poetry"). During the Occupation Lescure resumed editing "Messages" in 1942, printed in Brussels, with Paul Éluard, Raymond Queneau, Michel Leiris, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Bataille, Jean Paulhan, Guillevic, André Frénaud. "Domaine français" (Messages 1943) was printed in Geneva (Louis Aragon, Gaston Bachelard, Albert Camus, Paul Claudel, Paul Éluard, André Gide, Michel Leiris, François Mauriac, Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Romain Rolland, Raymond Queneau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Valéry). Jean Lescure became co-director of the clandestine review "Les Lettres françaises" and was one of the founders of the underground organization, the "Comité National des Ecrivains". After the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
