The Formal Imagination of Oulipo - Ploughshares.
Queneau’s A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, for example, consists of ten fourteen line poems with identical rhyme schemes. 17 Cutting between the lines allows them to be recombined into a total of ten to the power of fourteen or one hundred thousand.
Mollusks belong to the Cephalopoda class. Among the cephalopods we find animals like the squid, the cuttlefish, the nautilus, and the octopus. One species of squid, the Architeuthis can grow to gigantic sizes. Some specimens are known to reach up to seventeen feet in length. The cuttlefish is.
One, No One and One Hundred Thousand is an exhibition inspired by Oulipo’s literary strategies based on the idea of a “workshop of potential literature.” According to one of its founders, Raymond Queneau, Oulipo’s objective was to propose new “structures” for writers that are mathematical in nature, or to invent new artificial or mechanical procedures that could contribute to.
Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern. For example, maybe the novel must be written without repeating the same word, or without using any verbs, or without the letter E.
Thus, the total number of possible combinations contained in the book is 10 elevated to 14, i.e. a hundred billion different poems. That implies that no one will ever be able to read the whole book no matter how much it pawned, as it would take several million years to marry all the poems, that without eating, or sleep and without depart from the book.
Our Oulipian friend Raymond Queneau explored this type of literature through constraint in his collection, A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. This collection is a set of 10 sonnets, with each line being written on a separate piece of card. Since all of the poems share the same rhyme scheme and sounds, all of these lines can be mixed and matched.
Launched on 15 January 2001, Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that uses the web platform for online users to access. Boasting with over 26 million pieces of writing in 285 languages, Wikipedia has transformed to be a giant in the field of search engines optimization technology.