French Oulipianism

Oulipo, roughly translated, means "workshop of potential literature." It refers to a

loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members include novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poet Oskar Pastior 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.'

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 A Void) and palindromes, the group devises new techniques, often based on mathematical problems, such as the Knight's Tour of the chess-board and permutations. ("Oulipo," Wikipedia, pars 1-3)

The French Oulipians, Bök explains, revised "the structure of exception in order to oppose the irrationalism of the French Surrealists” (64). Literature, for Oulipians, is a cyberorganic phenomenon that results “from deliberative collisions between poetic devices: the machinic paralogy of accidents” (64). In revising the structure of exception, Oulipians "study the syzygia between the anomalos of a ‘constraint’ and the clinamen of its ‘potentials’” (64). Oulipo explores the "metaphysics of thetical cases with the ’pataphysics of hypothetical cases--the als ob, the ‘as if,’ of what might have been” (65).

 Georges Perec 

 Italo Calvino