Ouvroir de Littérature Potentille -- OULIPOT(Workshop for Potential Literature)– Referencing The New Media Reader, Wardrip-Fruin & Montfort

Queneau. 100,000,000,000 Poems. Paris: Gallimard 1961.----. Yours for the Telling. Gallimard. 1973.

Lescure. A Brief History of the Oulipo. Gallimard. 1973

Berge. For a Potential of Combinatory Literature. Gallimard. 1973.

Fournel. Computer and Writer: The Centre Pompidou Experiment. 1981

Calvino. Prose and Anticombinatorics. Gallimard 1981.

Backstory and Remembrances

Other examples of French influence on Art and Cinema.

Salon de Refusees btw http://www.googleartproject.com/

Auteur Theory in cinema.

• (Review) Cut-up Method of William Burroughs.

About Oulipo, From Lescure’s Brief History

• First meeting was November 24, 1960 – founded by Francois Le Lionais and Raymond Queneau.

• The essential object of their quest was literature “Every literary work begins with an inspiration … which must accommodate itself as well as possible to a series of constraints and procedures.”

• The Oulipo intended to demonstrate that these constraints are felicitous, generous and are in fact literature itself.

• THE GOAL, as iterated by Lescure was “To discover new structures and to furnish for each structure a small number of examples.

About Oulipo, From Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin• This “knitting circle” is not primarily about producing texts, it is

potential literature, not literature that its members fashion.

• The idea of potential literature is to analyze and synthesize constraints, eg the lipgram where a certain letter of the alphabet cannot be use.

• Founding text and prototypical example is A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, a sonnet that had the potential to define a new type of computer-mediated textuality, producing custom poems in ways that give the reader an enhanced role in the process of literary creation. (See Fournel, Centre Pomidou Experiment.)

Your thoughts, Your Links

A Documentary Saga of the Oulipo.

Italo Calvino. Distance from the Moon.

Calvino. The False Grandmother. Read by John Turturro.

Time Machine.