Reviews for Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (French Literature Series)

The average rating for Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (French Literature Series) based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-12-10 00:00:00 Robert Beck A brief review based on Mathews's Algorithm: Initial formula: A1 B1 C1 D1 A2 B2 C2 D2 A3 B3 C3 D3 A4 B4 C4 D4 A: This marvellous collection, plump with erudition, sparkling with innovation, makes me spasm in delight. B: This overview of Oulipian techniques, rife with creativity, shiny with brilliance, makes me come. C: The work of Queneau, especially the formulations, leaves me tongue-tied, makes me weep salt shakers. D: Perec is present, in a glorious shiny suit, twinkly with wondrousness; makes me want to love someone. Results upward: A1 B4 C3 D2 A2 B1 C4 D3 A3 B2 C1 D4 A4 B3 C2 D1 This marvellous collection makes me come: leaves me tongue-tied in a glorious shiny suit. Plump with erudition, this overview of Oulipian techniques makes me weep salt shakers'twinkly with wondrousness. Sparkling with innovation, rife with creativity, the work of Queneau makes want to love someone. Makes me spasm in delight: shiny with brilliance, especially the formulations: Perec is present. * OK, this is a crude (well'bad) example, but illustrates the Oulipo's success at creating combinatorial forms in literature. Technology has made many of their algorithms possible. Especially Raymond Queneau's One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. This volume contains the following: Harry Mathews: "Liminal Poem" / "Mathews's Algorithm" Francois Le Lionnais: "Lipo: First Manifesto" / "Second Manifesto" / "Raymond Queneau and the Amalgam of Mathematics and Literature" Jean Lescure: "Brief History of the Oulipo" Marcel Benabou: "Rule and Constraint." Collective: "The Collége de Pataphysique and the Oulipo" / "Recurrent Literature" Raymond Queneau: "Potential Literature" / The Relation X Takes Y For Z" / "A Story As You Like It" Jacques Bens: "Queneau Oulipian" Jacques Roubaud: "Mathematics in the Method of Raymond Queneau" Georges Perec: "History of the Lipogram" Claude Berge: "For a Potential Analysis of Combinatory Literature" Paul Fournel: "Computer and Writer: The Centre Pompidou Experiment" / "The Theatre Tree: A Combinatory Play" Italo Calvino: "Prose and Anticombinatorics" The material ranges from informative, historical, to brain-busting mathematical complexity. You get from this collection a sense of quite how remarkably gifted these French writers and mathematicians were, and as a "primer" it certainly leaves you wanting to read full-length works. Harry Mathews has always been the most lucid explainer of Oulipo techniques for me, perhaps due to faults in translation, and his piece gives the best examples of combinatorics in action. Warren Motte translated most of these pieces and at times his decision to leave quotations in the original French is a nuisance. These quibbles aside, this is a prim primer and a must for the logic-bound tinkerer. Recommended reading: Marcel Benabou: Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books = Pourquoi je n'ai ecrit aucun de mes livres Italo Calvino: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Paul Fournel: Little Girls Breathe the Same Air as We Do Harry Mathews: Tlooth (American Literature Oskar Pastior: Many Glove Compartments: Selected Poems Georges Perec: Life: A User's Manual Raymond Queneau: Exercises in Style Jacques Roubaud: The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis

Review # 2 was written on 2020-12-25 00:00:00 Jason Santiago Fairly dry, redundant essays with a few really fun bits spread through. Liked Perec and Queneau's bits the best of the more straight-played stuff, and Calvino's one was easily the most fun. Just falls sort of flat reading now since so much of the generative stuff is just like how all those twitter bots and every dialogue tree work now (points for that ig) and feels more like a party trick than anything really interesting...also sort of unclear why they pursue that stuff so much when they insist that they resist chance, "the only literature is voluntary literature" etc. Didn't come away convinced that the mega-constraint is as good as they think--I love having a theorem/mathematical structure underneath a piece, but far enough underneath that the ropes aren't leaving any marks. Fan of calling your predecessors "plagiarists by anticipation" though. Merry Christmas love for all <3