Oulipo Compendium

Oulipo Compendium PDF Author: Harry Mathews
Publisher: Make Now Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
A late 20th-century kabala, a labyrinth of literary secrets that will lure the uninitiated into rethinking everything they know about books and writing. The definitive encyclopedia of contemporary word-magic.

Oulipo Compendium

Oulipo Compendium PDF Author: Harry Mathews
Publisher: Make Now Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
A late 20th-century kabala, a labyrinth of literary secrets that will lure the uninitiated into rethinking everything they know about books and writing. The definitive encyclopedia of contemporary word-magic.

Oulipo

Oulipo PDF Author: Warren F. Motte
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The literary group known as Oulipo, was founded in Paris in 1960 to pursue writing in a way that contrasts strongly with the Anglo-American tradition. The examples included in this collection all display some form of literary constraint.

Tlooth

Tlooth PDF Author: Harry Mathews
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 9781564781949
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This novel begins in a Russian prison camp at a baseball game featuring the defective Baptists versus the Fideists. There is a plot (of sorts), one of revenge surrounding a doctor who, in removing a bone spur from our narrator, manages to amputate a ring and index finger, a significant surgical error considering that the narrator is, or was, a violinist. When Dr. Roak is released from prison, our narrator escapes in order to begin the pursuit, and thus begins a digressive journey from Afghanistan to Venice, then on to India and Morocco and France. All of this takes place amid Mathews's fictional concern and play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories.

The Oulipo and Modern Thought

The Oulipo and Modern Thought PDF Author: Dennis Duncan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192567438
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
The impact of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature 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 Bibliothèque 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.

The Penguin Book of Oulipo

The Penguin Book of Oulipo PDF Author: Philip Terry
Publisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN: 9780241378458
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 'Lovers of word games and literary puzzles will relish this indispensable anthology' The Guardian 'At times, you simply have to stand back in amazement' Daily Telegraph 'An exhilarating feat, it takes its place as the definitive anthology in English for decades to come' Marina Warner Brought together for the first time, here are 100 pieces of 'Oulipo' writing, celebrating the literary group who revelled in maths problems, puzzles, trickery, wordplay and conundrums. Featuring writers including Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino, it includes poems, short stories, word games and even recipes. Alongside these famous Oulipians, are 'anticipatory' wordsmiths who crafted language with unusual constraints and literary tricks, from Jonathan Swift to Lewis Carroll. Philip Terry's playful selection will appeal to lovers of word games, puzzles and literary delights.

A Void

A Void PDF Author: Georges Perec
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 9781567922967
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
"...a daunting triumph of will pushing its way through imposing roadblocks to a magical country, an absurdist nirvana of humor, pathos, and loss."--Time magazine A Void is a metaphysical whodunit, a story chock-full of plots and subplots, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of which afford Perec occasion to display his virtuosity as a verbal magician. It is also an outrageous verbal stunt: a 300-page novel that never once employs the letter E. The year is 1968, and as France is torn apart by social and political anarchy, the noted eccentric and insomniac Anton Vowl goes missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, his best friends scour his diary for clues to his whereabouts. At first glance these pages reveal nothing but Vowl's penchant for word games, especially for "lipograms," compositions in which the use of a particular letter is suppressed. But as the friends work out Vowl's verbal puzzles, and as they investigate various leads discovered among the entries, they too disappear, one by one by one, and under the most mysterious circumstances . . .

Cigarettes

Cigarettes PDF Author: Harry Mathews
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 1628974796
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Cigarettes is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. Though nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, we could describe this as a story about Allen, who is married to Maud but having an affair with Elizabeth, who lives with Maud. Or say it is a story about fraud in the art world, horse racing, and sexual intrigues. Or, as one critic did, compare it to a Jane Austen creation, or to an Aldous Huxley novel—and be right and wrong on both counts. What one can emphatically say is that Cigarettes is a brilliant display of Harry Mathews's ingenuity and deadly playfulness.

All that is Evident is Suspect

All that is Evident is Suspect PDF Author: Oulipo (Association)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781944211523
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Since its inception in Paris in 1960, the OuLiPo--ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop for potential literature--has continually expanded our sense of what writing can do. It's produced, among many other marvels, a detective novel without the letter e (and a sequel of sorts without a, i, o, u, or y); an epic poem structured by the Parisian métro system; a story in the form of a tarot reading; a poetry book in the form of a game of go; and a suite of sonnets that would take almost 200 million years to read completely. Lovers of literature are likely familiar with the novels of the best-known Oulipians--Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, Raymond Queneau--and perhaps even the small number of texts available in English on the group, including Warren Motte's Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature and Daniel Levin Becker's Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature. But the actual work of the group in its full, radiant collectivity has never before been showcased in English. ("The State of Constraint," a dossier in issue 22 of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, comes closest.) Enter All That is Evident is Suspect: the first collection in English to offer a life-size picture of the group in its historical and contemporary incarnations, and the first in any language to represent all of its members (numbering 41 as of April 2018 ). Combining fiction, poetry, essays and lectures, and never-published internal correspondence--along with the acrobatically constrained writing and complexly structured narratives that have become synonymous with oulipian practice--this volume shows a unique group of thinkers and artists at work and at play, meditating on and subverting the facts of life, love, and the group itself. It's an unprecedentedly intimate and comprehensive glimpse at the breadth and diversity of one of world literature's most vital, adventurous presences. DISCUSSED: Sharks as poets and vice versa, the Brisbane pitch drop experiment, novel classifications for real or imaginary libraries, the monumental sadness of difficult loves, the obsolescence of the novel, the symbolic significance of the cup-and-ball game, holiday closures across the Francophone world, what happens at Fahrenheit 452, Warren G. Harding's dark night of the soul, Marcel Duchamp's imperviousness to conventional spacetime laws, bilingual palindromes, cartoon eodermdromes, oscillating poems, métro poems, metric poems, literary madness, straw cultivation.

Oulipo Laboratory

Oulipo Laboratory PDF Author: Raymond Queneau
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The Oulipo was founded in 1960 by a group of leading French writers and mathematicians, it still meets regularly some thirty five years later, making it one of the longest lived and productive literary groupings ever. The Oulipo's original aim was to inquire into the possibilities of combining literature and mathematics, but this field of study was soon expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems. Remarkable Oulipian works have been written by Queneau, Calvino, Perec, Roubaud, Mathews (to mention only those familiar to English-speaking readers). The group publishes a series of small booklets for circulation among its friends. This anthology reproduces six of them in English facsimile, from among the earliest (no. 3, 1976) to the most recent (no. 70, 1995); it provides the English reader with a taste at least of one of the most sustained and intriguing literary investigations of recent years.

Eunoia

Eunoia PDF Author: Christian Bök
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1847672442
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
'Eunoia', which means 'beautiful thinking', is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels. This book also contains them all, except that each one appears by itself in its own chapter. A unique personality for each vowel soon emerges: A is courtly, E is elegiac, I is lyrical, O is jocular, U is obscene. A triumphant feat, seven years in the making, Eunoia is as playful as it is awe-inspiring.