Oulipo

Oulipo was founded by a group of men in 1960 and it took 15 years before the first woman was allowed to join; this was Michèle Métail who became a member in 1975 and has since distanced herself from the group.^[7][8] Since 1960 only six women have joined Oulipo,^[8][9] with Clémentine Mélois last to join in June 2017.^[10]

Oulipian works

Some examples of Oulipian writing:

• Queneau's Exercices de Style is the recounting ninety-nine times of the same inconsequential episode, in which a man witnesses a minor altercation on a bus trip; each account is unique in terms of tone and style.
• Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes is inspired by children's picture books in which each page is cut into horizontal strips that can be turned independently, allowing different pictures (usually of people: heads, torsos, waists, legs, etc.) to be combined in many ways. Queneau applies this technique to poetry: the book contains 10 sonnets, each on a page. Each page is split into 14 strips, one for each line. The author estimates in the introductory explanation that it would take approximately 200 million years to read all possible combinations.
• Perec's novel
  La disparition, translated into English by Gilbert Adair and published under the title A Void, is a 300-page novel written without the letter "e", an example of a lipogram. The English translation, A Void, is also a lipogram. The novel is remarkable not only for the absence of "e", but it is a mystery in which the absence of that letter is a central theme. Perec would go on to write with the inverse constraint in Les Revenents, with only the vowel “e” present in the work. Ian Monk
  would later translate Les Revenents into English under the title The Exeter Text.
• Singular Pleasures by Harry Mathews describes 61 different scenes, each told in a different style (generally poetic, elaborate, or circumlocutory) in which 61 different people (all of different ages, nationalities, and walks of life) masturbate.

Constraints

Some Oulipian constraints:^[11]

S+7, sometimes called N+7

Replace every noun in a text with the seventh noun after it in a dictionary. For example, "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago..." becomes "Call me Ishmael. Some yes-men ago...". Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used. This technique can also be performed on other lexical classes, such as verbs.

Snowball, or a Rhopalism

A poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer.

Stile

A method wherein each “new” sentence in a paragraph stems from the last word or phrase in the previous sentence (e.g. “I descend the long ladder brings me to the ground floor is spacious…”). In this technique the sentences in a narrative continually overlap, often turning the grammatical object in a previous sentence into the grammatical subject of the next. The author may also pivot on an adverb, prepositional phrase, or other transitory moment.

Lipogram

Writing that excludes one or more letters. The previous sentence is a lipogram in B, F, J, K, Q, V, Y, and Z (it does not contain any of those letters).

Prisoner's constraint, also called Macao constraint

A type of lipogram that omits letters with ascenders and descenders (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, and y).

Palindromes

Sonnets and other poems constructed using palindromic techniques.

Univocalism

A poem using only one vowel letter. In English and some other languages the same vowel letter can represent different sounds, which means that, for example, "born" and "cot" could both be used in a univocalism. (Words with the same American English vowel sound but represented by different 'vowel' letters could not be used – e.g. "blue" and "stew".)

Pilish

A method of writing wherein one matches the length of words (or amount of words in a sentence) to the digits of pi.

Mathews' Algorithm

Elements in a text are moved around by a set of predetermined rules^[12][13]

Members

Founding members

The founding members of Oulipo represented a range of

Living members

Deceased members

See also

• One-letter word
• Constrained writing
• E-Prime
• Modernist poetry
• Ouxpo
• Outrapo
• Ougrapo
• Oubapo

References