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Oulipo

Oulipo stands for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (or workshop for potential literature), where the term littérature potentielle is defined as "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy."

 

The group was founded in France in 1960 by the French author Raymond Queneau and the mathematical historian François Le Lionnais. The aim of this group of mathematicians and writers was to exploring how mathematical structures and other highly restrictive methods might be used to create literature.

 

The group utilized such methods as: S+7, in which every noun in a text is replaced with the seventh noun after it in a dictionary; the Snowball, a poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer; Lipograms, written works that exclude one or more letters, the most notable example of which is Georges Perec's novel, A Void, which at no point uses the letter e; Prisoner's 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), and Univocalisms, poems using only one vowel, excellent examples of which can be read in the book Eunoia by Christian Bök.

The Oulipo is renowned for producing work that is both eccentric and hilarious. Although the method of randomly selecting a page in the dictionary and writing a chapter of a book using all the words on it does not appear as a method in the Oulipo Compendium, Naomi Styles would like to think that Oulipians and Oulipo fans everywhere will consider Elixir a typical example of the genre.

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