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Outside his native France, Novelist Georges Perec (1936-82) was known chiefly as a member of OuLiPo, an acronym for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature). The authors and scientists who constituted this informal group had a common goal: the discovery of new or fiendishly difficult and complex ways of arranging words in sequence. When it came to setting Procrustean rules and then writing freely in spite of them, none of the OuLiPo circle was more inventive and whimsical than Perec. He composed a full-length novel, La Disparition, without once using the letter e. He devised...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Jigsaws Life: a User's Manual | 11/23/1987 | See Source »

...OuLiPo intends to do systematically and scientifically, and if need be, by resorting to the good offices of computers." "Structure is the work of OuLiPo," explains Mathemagician Francois LeLionnais, 75, a founder of the organization. "We are not interested in great literature, though we appreciate it." Adds Novelist Georges Perec: "We reject the noble image of literature as a divine inspiration. In our view, language is a kind of putty that we can shape." Among the stranger shapes issuing from the OuLiPo factory are palindromes-words or statements that read identically backward and forward. "Straw? No, too stupid...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Science: Perverbs and Snowballs | 1/10/1977 | See Source »

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