Paying attention to numbers can open up meaning in books
Sarah Hart, a professor of geometry, looks at works including “Moby Dick” and “War and Peace”
THE MEMBERS of Oulipo—an abbreviation of ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or “workshop of potential literature”—gathered in a café in Paris in November 1960. The avant-garde group sought new ways to tell stories; they revelled in constraint. In 1947 Raymond Queneau, the collective’s co-founder, had imagined a single short story in 99 different ways in his “Exercises in Style”. In 1969 Georges Perec wrote a novel that omitted the letter “e”. Three years later he produced a novella in which “e” was the only vowel used.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Common denominators”
Culture April 15th 2023
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- The role of bacteria and viruses in world history
- Sarah Bernhardt was the first modern celebrity
- A thrilling account of a shipwreck in the Pacific in 1741
- Paying attention to numbers can open up meaning in books
- A new language textbook in Mexico has caused a brouhaha
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