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Oulipo

Prakruti Bhatt

Created on February 20, 2024

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Transcript

N+7

"The darkness drops again; but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

-W.B. Yeats' The Second Coming

  • Identify the nouns in the text above
  • Open a dictionary and search for the nouns you identified
  • Skip seven entries after each identified noun
  • Replace the identified nouns in the text with the ones you found seven entries after the nouns in the dictionary.
  • How does the text look now?

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"And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly."

-T.S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi

Oulipo- Creativity through Constraint

Important Figures:

Origins:

A group of writers and mathematicians formed by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in Paris in 1960. The name is a French acronym of Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, which translates into Workshop for Potential Literature.

Notable members of the group include George Perec and Italo Calvino, Oskar Pastior and Jacques Roubaud.

Relevance:

Practices and Techniques:

The group rejected spontaneous chance and the subconscious as sources of inspiration for literary creativity. And emphasised systematic and self restricting means of writing texts. Some of these techniques include n+7, lipograms, palindromes, etc.

The origin and development of Oulipo is considerd to be a significant historical moment for the emergence of Computational Literary Studies like Digital/Electronic Literature.