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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Oulipo founded (24/11/1960)
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2024 23:45:14 +1300
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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OUvroir de LIttératire POtentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature)
"a group of mainly French writers who created experimental works using 
techniques of constrained writing"

Examples of constraints:
- using only words extracted from a previously existing text [as in _A 
Humument_]
https://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Humument
- a technological length constraint [Twitterature]

- avoidance -- writing a work that does not contain a particular letter 
(lipogram) or punctuation mark or part of speech
_Gadsby_ by Ernest Wright, uses no <e>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
_La Disparition_ by Georges Perec likewise
(Perec is the only one of the Oulipo group Crystal names)

- or insistence -- every word must contain a particular letter...etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo

I guess the -lipo in Oulipo was probably a deliberate link to the lipo- 
in lipogram (which goes back to the 18th century), from Greek leipein 
'to leave out, to be missing'.

"Ouvroir" is a pretty obscure word. (A "writer's workshop" would, I 
think, normally be called an "atelier" in French.) Petit Larousse says

Ouvroir (n.m.) Etablissement de bienfaisance où des jeunes filles et des 
femmes se livrent en commun à des travaux de lingerie; dans les 
communautés de femmes, lieu où les religieuses s'assemblent pour 
travailler.

Sounds a bit like the Magdalen Laundries, or a workhouse for indigent 
females.

Any special reason why they would choose that? (All those named in the 
Wiki article were men. They did, however, have some connection with 
Pataphysics -- which we won't get into here.)