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17- 18 Mar
semaine de la langue française In the context of the Semaine de la langue française (French Language Week), the annual international celebration of the French language and French-speaking cultures, the Institut français has organised two days of events around the key fi gure of Georges Perec (1936-82) and the influential Oulipo group. Georges PerecPerec made his literary debut with Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965) and went on to his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life: A User’s Manual (1978), nine years in the making, was immediately acclaimed as one of the most dazzling and ingeniously contrived works of 20th-century fiction, a masterpiece to put beside Joyce’s Ulysses. It won the Prix Medicis and established Perec’s international reputation.
The OulipoFounded in 1960 by François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau, the Oulipo stands for OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature. It consists of writers and mathematicians who invent, reinvent and experiment with different types of formal constraints. Perec (a member from 1967), for example, created possibly the longest palindrome ever written (Ca ne va pas sans dire), a 466-word text where the only vowel allowed is ‘a’ (What a man!), and a 300-page novel (La Disparition) written without the letter ‘e’. Life: A User’s Manual was likewise written according to a complex set of rules (including, famously, one based on an algorithm from higher mathematics – the “orthogonal Latin bi-square order 10”) which, although not apparent in a casual reading, constrain and order every aspect of the novel’s structure. Two exclusive events hosted at the Institut français and the historic Calder Bookshop will celebrate the work of Perec and the Oulipo writers. On Monday 17 March, Oulipians Jacques Roubaud , Marcel Benabou , Ian Monk and Hervé Le Tellier will join Oulipo President Paul Fournel at the Institut to discuss the newly-updated translation of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (Vintage, 2008) with its distinguished translator David Bellos (Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton, and winner of the 2005 Man Booker International Translator’s Prize). Then on Tuesday 18 March these same authors will join the British Oulipian Stanley Chapman and associated poets Joe Dunthorne , Tim Clare and Ross Sutherland at the Calder Bookshop on The Cut for an evening of readings from their work. A number of creative writing workshops for schools will run in parallel over the two days.
Mon 17 Mar | Georges Perec: Life, A User’s Manual7.30pm | Institut français | tickets: £3, conc. £2 | in French & English
with Jacques Roubaud, Marcel Benabou, Hervé Le Tellier, Ian Monk, Paul Fournel and David Bellos.
Tue 18 Mar | Oulipo Evening  7.30pm | Calder Bookshop | tickets: £3, conc. £2 | in French & English
with Jacques Roubaud, Marcel Benabou, Hervé Le Tellier, Ian Monk, Paul Fournel, Joe Dunthorne, Tim Clare, Stanley Chapman and Ross Sutherland. Find out more and reservation. Authors biography
Marcel Bénabou
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Stanley Chapman
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Tim Clare
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Joe Dunthorne
| (member since 1969)
Emeritus Professor of Ancient History and distinguished literary critic, he and friend Georges Perec were behind the PALF (“Production Automatique de Littérature Française”) and LSD (“Litterature Semi-Défi- nitionnelle”) projects begun in 1966. Inventor of nine writing constraints.
| (member since 1961)
architect and translator of Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes,
and of several novels by Boris Vian.
| writer and performer. In 2005 he presented Channel 4’s How To Get A Book Deal from the from Guardian Hay
Festival, in which he promoted his first novel, Joshu Replied.
| prize-winning poet and author of the quirky coming-of-age tale Submarine (Hamish Hamilton, 2008), described by The Independent as “the sharpest, funniest, rudest account of a periodically troubled male teenager’s coming-of-age since The Catcher in the Rye.”
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Hervé Le Tellier
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Ian Monk
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Jacques Roubaud
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Paul Fournel
| (member since 1992)
poet, playwright and novelist, Hervé writes a daily column for lemonde.fr and is a regular contestant on cult literary quiz ‘Papous dans la tête’ on French radio station Culture France. | (member since 1998)
poet, translator (notably of George Perec’s monosyllabic text What a man!), author (with Harry Matthews) of the Oulipo Compendium and the inventor of a new writing constraint, the ‘monkine’. | (member since 1966)
poet, retired mathematician, and author of the first volume in the group writing project kickstarted by Georges Perec’s Le Voyage d’hiver. Inventor of nine writing constraints. | (member since 1972)
novelist, poet and playwright, Paul belongs to the second generation of Oulipians who were invited to join by Queneau himself. Oulipo President since 2004, and inventor of three writing constraints. |
Ross Sutherland
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David Bellos
| | He made his name touring with the award-winning live poetry collective Aisle 16. A self-confessed video game geek, he has recently completed a thesis on computer-generated poetry and writes univocalisms – poems written using only one vowel (his first collection Things To Do Before You Leave Town is due out later this year). Tipped, with Joe Dunthorne as one of the ‘Top Ten Literary Stars of 2008’ by the Times. | Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton. He has published three books in the field of Balzac studies and has also worked closely on the modern French writer Georges Perec, first as his principal English translator (Life, A User’s Manual, 1987, which won the French-American Foundation’s translation prize in 1988; W or the Memory of Childhood, 1988; Things, 1990; 53 Days, 1992) and then as the author of the first literary biography (Georges Perec. A Life in Words, Boston, 1993) which in French translation, was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie (1994). In 2005 he was awarded the International Man Booker Translator’s Prize for his translation of Ismail Kadaré’s work. He also holds the rank of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. |
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