Established in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, the Oulipo (or Workshop of Potential Literature) has made a unique and enduring contribution to world literature, with works like Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual and Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller. Today, the group's impact can be registered in innovative writing practice from poetry and performance, to fiction and film. This course will explore Oulipian practice across a variety of kinds of writing, drawn from: poetry, performance, the novel, the short story, autobiography, the essay, cartoons, translation, illustration, and nonsense writing.
Module supervisor: Philip Terry
Office: 5NW.4.8, email: pterry@essex.ac.uk, tel: 01206 872618
Academic Support Hours are available at your convenience.
Module Calendar
Class 1: Introduction + Elementary Morality
Class 2: Transforming Texts: N+7 and Antonyms
Class 3: Alphabets (Outdoor Classroom 1)
Class 4: Workshop on Alphabets
Class 5: Action & Writing: the Walk Poems of Richard Long (Outdoor Classroom 2)
Class 6: Oulipo and Autobiography: I Remember & I Don't Remember
Class 7: Winter Journeys
Class 8: Ou-X-Pos: cooking, cartoons, drawing, essays etc.
Class 9: Tree Mesostics (Outdoor Classroom 3)
Class 10: Assignment Workshop
(Further details are available on Talis)
Assessment
Creative Writing students will normally be expected to submit creative work of their own, accompanied by a critical commentary, of a combined length of 5,000 words. The relative lengths of these components will depend on the nature of your writing, and should be negotiated with your module tutor. Commentaries should address issues such as: process of composition, development and revision, theoretical context, other relevant contexts and self-evaluation of work. Coursework deadline: 20 January 2020.