Abstract
Oulipo, the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle,1 dedicated to the use of constraints as a mechanism for the production ofliterary texts, was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and a group of other writers and mathematicians. Constraints could be applied to existing works, as in Queneau's transformation of sonnets by Mallarmé into haikus, an effect achieved by discarding all but the rhyming sections.2 They could also be used to generate new works, such as Georges Perec's novel La Disparition,3 which embodies the principle of the lipogramme, the suppression of one or more letters, through its exclusion of the letter ‘e’. Virtuoso examples such as these have attracted the interest of artists outside the field of literature, and various Ou-X-po based on, for example, painting (Oupeinpo) and cinema (Oucipo), have come into existence since the 1960s.4
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