Oulipo (Association)

On translating avant garde and genderless literature.

The pleasures of literary play in the writer’s final novel.

If the experimental French writing group Oulipo were to be reborn today, would they return as performance artists? Anne Garréta’s 2002 Prix Médicis–winning novel, Not One Day, marks her as a literary acrobat suspended between those who hold on to the group’s relevance and those who have let it go in favor of conceptual art practices.

Though she wouldn’t join the Oulipo for another fourteen years, Anne Garréta’s 1986 novel, Sphinx, is quintessentially Oulipian.

Silent film, Oulipian lyrics, and keeping it all together.

Barbara Henning’s sprawling volume underlines the joy of old-fashioned, mail correspondence and features a thorough and revealing interview with Harryette Mullen.

Hervé Le Tellier’s two recent works, Enough About Love and The Sextine Chapel, present an intellectual, geometrically woven, and wholly stimulating take on erotic-lit.

If you’re interested in the writing practices associated with Oulipo (founded in 1960, it has included Raymond Queneau, Harry Mathews, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec), you’ll want this book recording a 2005 conference on the poetics of constraint. 

Harry Mathews has covered the literary terrain: as short story writer, poet, novelist, essayist, translator and editor. Here, he and Lynne Tillman discuss his recent novel, Cigarettes, the role of the reader, and the OuLiPo’s use of literary contraintes — constrictive forms.