Many subtle channels : in praise of potential literature / Daniel Levin Becker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Levin Becker, Daniel.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literary form.

Authors, American--21st century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Oulipo (Association).

Levin Becker, Daniel.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (351 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

A NOTE ON FORMATTING

I. Present

A Library Burning

Reading Out Loud

Little Demons of Subtlety

Get It in Writing

II. Past

Let There Be Limit

The Rat in Laboratory

Publish and Perish

III. Future

Packrats Who Build the Library

Safety in Letters

Potential Weaving

Questions and Answers

Acknowledgments. Index

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

ISBN:

9780674065277

0674065271

9780674069626

0674069625

OCLC:

794004240