Constrained writing and critical reflection

© 2016 Mitchell Paul KerleyThe Oulipo is a group that is best known for its practice of constrained writing: a form of composition based on the use of additional, arbitrary restrictions in the writing process. This practice has been widely studied in the group and in secondary literature, but I argue here that an important dimension of constrained writing has not yet been fully developed. Its generative potential informs not only the composition of the text, but can create a process of critical reflection on the text as well. To develop a concept of criticism grounded in the generative principle of a text, I draw on the work of Walter Benjamin, whose early articulation of a reflective criticism informs his late work as well. I argue that Benjamin’s The Arcades Project groups together his conceptions of the philosophical idea, collection, and reflection, and may be used as a model for the critical work described in this thesis. Through these principles, I develop a kind of criticism that requires the reader to first engage with the methods behind the work, and to then reflect on this method to infer the organising idea or absolute. The critical work that I develop will thus address the process of constrained writing from the position of the writer, rather than the written text itself. This theoretical perspective orients my reading of three Oulipian texts in the thesis’s final chapter: Georges Perec’s La disparition, a lipogrammatic novel in “e;” Jacques Jouet’s Metro-poems, based on the stops and starts of train rides; and Hervé Le Tellier’s The Sextine Chapel, which uses mathematical and poetic rules in its construction