The End of Oulipo?: An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement by Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito, and: Une nouvelle pratique littéraire en France: Histoire du groupe Oulipo de 1960 à nos jours / Creating a New French Literary Style: A History of the Oulipo Circle by Cécile De Bary (review)

Two recent texts join the field of research on the Oulipo writing group. The End of Oulipo?: An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement is a slim volume, mostly comprising two essays and a preface. Authors Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito contribute one essay each, in which they address some of the issues that have arisen with the present-day Oulipo. Cécile De Bary’s Une nouvelle pratique littéraire en France: Histoire du groupe Oulipo de 1960 à nos jours is almost as brief, and assesses the Oulipo in terms of its evolution from experimental workshop to literary group.

The Oulipo, or “Ouvoir de littérature potentielle” (“Workshop of potential literature”) is now over fifty years old. It was founded in November 1960 by novelist Raymond Queneau and polymath François Le Lionnais, as a group dedicated to investigating what they called “potential literature.” The jointly-written preface to The End of Oulipo? explains what this means: “The concept of potential literature is founded on a paradoxical principle: that through the use of a formal constraint the writer’s creative energy is liberated” (1).

The preface of The End of Oulipo? provides a brief overview of the group, just enough to acquaint newcomers, before moving on to the study’s critical work. For Oulipo devotees, or anyone who first reads De Bary’s book or (Oulipian) Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (2012), this section does not contain much that is new. Attentive readers may also note with irritation that Marcel Duchamp is listed as a founding member on the first page; while a member of the group’s first generation, Duchamp did not actually join until 1962. Nevertheless, for its brevity, the section commendably brings newcomers up to speed with the long history of a complicated group, and raises the book’s key questions. In short, the authors ask where the Oulipo can go from here, and what changes might improve the group’s literary output and future viability.

To get to these questions, Elkin and Esposito’s preface reviews what (and where) the Oulipo has been. They cover the group’s founding, its initial obscurity, Queneau’s break with the Surrealists, Le Lionnais’s manifestos, the creative boom of the sixties and seventies, and the movement’s present-day stagnation, which is blamed in part on the failings of a younger generation. Despite the book’s title, and its criticism of the current state of affairs, this preface is favorable to Oulipo (perhaps excepting the treatment of some select writers). The authors write: “Were the Oulipo to come to an end tomorrow it could only be regarded as an immense success” (9). The authors evidently care about the group, which is why they set out to critique it. Levin Becker argues that potential literature is “both the things that literature could be and the things that could be literature” (9); Elkin and Esposito’s investigation looks at the potential of the Oulipo itself. They are writing for the sake of its future, wanting it to be what it could be, and pointing to today’s writers who might deserve to join its ranks.

Esposito’s essay, “Eight Glances Past Georges Perec,” begins by noting the absence of reference to Perec in David Shields’s plagiaristic manifesto Reality Hunger. Reality Hunger advocates art that has a greater engagement with reality, by way of its use of collage and plagiarism. Esposito shows that Shields’s core descriptors of innovation “are all salient aspects of...