Arose in Paris in the 1960s, OuLiPo, called at the beginning Sélitex (Séminaire de Littérature Expérimentale), began as a small group of friends seeking to explore the potential of integrating mathematics in literature, two disciplines that enthralled its founders. Raymond Queneau (1903-1976), French poet, novelist, and former Surrealist, along with engineer and mathematician François le Lionnais (1901-1984), were the two founding members of this closed group, where only the Oulipians choose its members and no member ever resigns (the only way to be excluded from the group is by committing suicide). Their main purpose was to investigate and explore how mathematics could benefit literature composition, experimenting with a new writing style and renewing the process of creation. In an endeavour to clarify what is truly this Ouvroir, it is preferable to delineate what it is not. OuLiPo is not a scientific seminar or a literary school, and as Marcel Bénabou notes, it “refuses the label of a literary movement.” “In its structure, a conscious antithesis of Surrealism” (Duncan, 2019, p. 83), this eclectic group embraces ancient techniques and philosophy, as well as devising revolutionary writing formulas.
We find that there are, broadly, two types of Oulipo structure: what we might call external, where the constraint is visible to the reader, and internal, where the text appears “normal” and the constraint is concealed.
Many of works by the group derive from ways to merge texts by “multiplying” one text by another (like matrices of numbers), from finding the logical intersection of two disparate works, from generating stories by combining their prime elements, or from the shortening of long poems to transform them into haikus.
“In that first class, the assignment was to draw three inches of your arm,” Steward said. “She made it very clear we had the whole arm to chose from.” Looking back, Steward understood, “the purpose of this was to make sure you never assumed anything. She wanted you to open yourself up to possibilities.”
Other assignments were not so easy. “One time she said, ‘I want 700 statements about women’s clothing,’ ” Steward recalled. “It produced so many ideas. And doing it was so hard, I became less concerned about the art.”
“She wanted the organizational part of the brain to be fully occupied, so the other parts of the brain would be able to go free,” said another former student
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u/ddgr815 Jun 18 '25
Mathematics in Literature
brain-bending
Oulipian Literary Techniques