1. The Oulipo

2. What is the Oulipo? OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle Literary movement beginning in 1960 that explored the algorithmic possibilities of literature and the concrete nature of language.

3. Some Facts  Founded in 1960 by French-speaking writers and mathematicians  Grew out of a conference dedicated to Raymond Queneau  More interested in developing literary forms than actual literature  Still active today

4. Readings  Queneau’s A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems - made by recombining lines of a sonnet as individual parts  “Yours for the Telling” - “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style narrative arranged entirely as footnotes  Jean Lescure’s A Brief History of the Oulipo - tells the Oulipo story, playing with language throughout  Claude Berge’s For a Potential Analysis of Combinatory Literature - proposes a number of models for analyzing algorithmic literature  Paul Fournel’s Computer and Writer - how computers can aid both reading and writing to form new kinds of literature  Italo Calvino’s Prose and Anticombinatorics - using a computer to limit algorithmically the number of narrative possibilities in order to free the writer from the job of narrative construction in order to focus on unpredictable storytelling moments (“clinamen”)

5. Context 1  The French tradition of the artist– intellectual, and the connection between art and politics

6. Context 2  L’Académie Française and the control of language

7. Context 3  France at war. Recently under Nazi German occupation, now fighting repressive war of imperialism in Algeria

8. Context 4  Legacy of (high) modernism via New York school

9. Oulipo Aims and Themes  Wanted to re-examine the role of inspiration and consider literature as a concrete object that could be explored.  Texts are “machines” that allow an “indefinite quantity of potential meanings.”  New algorithms of literature reveal the inherent combinatory nature and objective concreteness of language.

10. Oulipo Aims and Themes  Computers can act as ideal reading or writing machines–their logic is similarly combinatory.  All of this was to explore ideas of freedom and revolutionary thinking.

11. Connections 1  Object Oriented Programming concerns itself with the potentialities of combinatory algorithms

12. Connections 2  Gaming narratives are not fixed, but are a collaboration between author and “reader,” an open text in which any/all meanings are possible.