Adam Ash

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Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Those weird Oulipians of literature

To the literary bondage freaks of Oulipo, a sestina is no challenge. 'Yet another quintessentially Oulipian work, Georges Perec's 300-page novel "La Disparition," doesn't contain a single letter E except, of course, for the four unfortunate instances in his name. Think of this -- no "the," "are," "were," "he," "she," "they," nor even an "even." In an essay on such lipograms, works that omit letters, Perec defends the sanity and seriousness of such an undertaking by arguing that constraint and artifice are the engines that have driven not only Oulipians, but also many mainstream authors to plumb obscure possibilities near the fringe of language and sense.' Wanna play? More masochistic lit games here.

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