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Loading... Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (original 2012; edition 2012)by Daniel Levin Becker (Author)
Work InformationMany Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature by Daniel Levin Becker (2012)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. It sounds like they're having more fun and are more "geeky" than before. At the same time, I get the impression that there are no Queneaus or Perecs among their number. What I find interesting about the OuLiPo project is the use of constraint to permit creativity. What I find here is a delight in eccentricity and individuals. If the book veers into "you don't have to be crazy to work here but it helps" territory at times, it is still infused with the oulipoean spirit, and I now know that Poe's "The Raven" is a lipogram in Z. ( ) Finally (the delay was mine) my review is posted at Three Percent. no reviews | add a review
What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau-and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature's quirkiest movements. An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature's possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for "workshop for potential literature") is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec's novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo's mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris. He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker's love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman's delight in Russian literature in The Possessed. In recent years, the Oulipo has inspired the creation of numerous other collectives: the OuMuPo (a collective of DJs), the OuMaPo (marionette players), the OuBaPo (comic strip artists), the OuFlarfPo (poets who generate poetry with the aid of search engines), and a menagerie of other Ou-X-Pos (workshops for potential something). Levin Becker discusses these and other intriguing developments in this history and personal appreciation of an iconic-and iconoclastic-group. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)840.9Literature French and related languages French literature History, descriptionLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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