Literary Memory, Consciousness, and the Group Oulipo (review)

L'Esprit Créateur Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives . Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Pp. ix + 2%. The work of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson in the field of autobiographical studies is well known to students and scholars. This handbook to the subject matter, forms, and history of autobiography in western culture is both timely and useful, given the expansion of the various forms of life writing, which include biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and theoretical investigations into the modes of interpreting such texts. Smith and Watson identify some fifty-two genres of life narratives, devoting a chapter to examining the differences and commonalities of these forms, with particular attention to point of view and narrative technique within the historical development and expansion of forms. This chapter is particularly helpful for students of these genres, as the differences among forms of life writing rest in the perspective of the speaker in relation to a listener who may be one's self, God, a lover, parent, or a blank page of writing paper. As the authors point out, the power structures at work within the writing moment can be resistant , demanding, empowering, or destructive. The authors' attention to ways of reading and the history of "reading publics" (Chapter 7) is particularly helpful in identifying the history of texts as texts by questioning the role of the reading public in the act of reading and interpretation and in creating an audience. One of the most helpful elements of the book is the classroom group projects section included in Appendix B. This guide to writing outlines "what to do with texts" in ways that bring students into the act of writing autobiographically, with particular attention to the place of audience. Awareness of self as a writer and of the possible readership develops the dualthinking that is central to autobiographical writing: writing for yourself and your "other" at the same time. I find this an excellent guide to a large canon of writing, and am eager to use it in my courses in life writing. Shari Benstock University of Miami Peter Consenstein. Literary Memory, Consciousness, and the Group Oulipo. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002. Pp. 252. $42. As he launches his argument in this interesting study, Peter Consenstein deplores the erosion of "mnemonic culture" (11), and proposes to examine the sort of cultural memory that the history of literature encodes. He suggests that the constraint-based literary practice of the Ouvroir de Litt érature Potentielle (Oulipo) offers a model of the kind of mnemonic reconstruction that might lead us out of cultural amnesia, if only we are willing to follow their example. Concentrating closely—but by no means exclusively—on Jacques Roubaud's theory of poetic memory, Consenstein situates that rebuilding process at the center of the Oulipian enterprise: "The entire Oulipian project is imbued with, impregnated with, aching with, a memory quest" (41-42). Consenstein devotes his first chapter to a consideration of how Oulipian formal constraints articulate with literary memory locally, and in specific ways. Reading Roubaud's La Boucle, Georges Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi, and Ã-talo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, he finds that there are close resemblances between certain effects those authors deploy and techniques common in the tradition of mnemonics in literature. Roubaud's use of mathematics, for instance, recalls earlier memory tools, as do Perec's use of the grid and the imbricated structure of Calvino's novel. In his second chapter, provocatively entitled "The Soul of Oulipian Formalism ," Consenstein turns to the philosophical and aesthetic models that subtend the Oulipo's work, invoking Plato, St. Augustine, Boileau, Jarry, and Bergson, among other figures. Reading Raymond Queneau's important reconfiguration of the notion of creative inspiration against the counterexample of Surrealist theory, he suggests that the Oulipo's idea of poetic creativity as an act that is first and foremost artisanal in character is a productive and indeed refreshing way to construe the literary act. 92 Winter 2002 Book Reviews An examination of the notion of play as a foundational Oulipian principle furnishes the material for Consenstein's third chapter. He focuses here...