Scope and Contents Oulipo is an acronym for the French word meaning "Workshop for Potential Literature." The group was formed in 1960 by Raymond Queneau, a celebrated novelist and poet who was not an inconsequential amateur mathematician and his friend, Francois Le Lionnais, a chessmaster who shared his friend's love for mathematics. Queneau had been struggling with a literary task of immense complexity, his 100 trillion poems and asked Le Lionnais for practical assistance.When they discusses this problem, their conversations turned to the possibility of incorporating mathematical structures into the process of literary creation. Queneau had ready been doing this in his novels, but no one noticed until he mentioned it. Queneau and Le Lionnais soon widened their investigations beyond mathematics to include all forms of artificial restriction in literature. As an Oulipean term, restriction means a constraining method or system or rule that can be precisely defined. All literature is limited by the...

Scope and Contents Internet Peter Baker's translation of introduction: During the last week of August 1939, while rumors of war invaded Paris, a young literature professor, Vincent Degrael, was invited to spend several days at a property in the neighborhood of le Havre that belonged to the parents of one of his colleagues, Denis Borrade. The eve of his departure, while he was exploring the library of his hosts searching for one of the books that one has always promised oneself to read, but which one generally only has time to flip through the pages negligently next to the fire before going to make up the fourth at bridge, Degrael fell upon a slim volume entitled The Winter Voyage, whose author, Hugo Vernier, was absolutely unknown to him, but the first pages of which made such a strong impression on him that he barely took the time to excuse himself from his friend and his hosts before going to read it in his room. The Winter Voyage was a sort of first-person narrative, situated in a...