This introductory essay defines the background terms and context of constraint-based writing and then situates each essay included in this double issue of Poetics Today. Taking the example of the Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature) as the foundational reference of contemporary intentional experiments with formal literary creation, we delineate the shifting boundaries of constrained literature, both in terms of its various practitioners (the genres, techniques, intentions they inscribe into their work) and the increasingly wider audiences to which it appeals. Recapping a brief history of constrained contemporary writing, this introduction argues for a conception of constrained writing that emphasizes intelligent freedom, the potentials opened by new forms of media, and the effects of an extended community based on formal approaches to both the composition and the appreciation of literature.

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Albérès, René-Marill
1969
“Drôles de drames,”
Nouvelles littéraires
, May 22,
5
.
Barthes, Roland
1992
[1953]
Writing Degree Zero
, translated by Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
Bataille, Georges
2002
[1935]
Blue of Noon
, translated by Harry Mathews (New York: Marion Boyars).
Bénabou, Marcel
1998
[1986]
Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books
, translated by David Kornacker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).
Bök, Christian
2001
Eunoia
(Toronto: Coach House).
2007
Oulipo and Its Unacknowledged Legislation
,” in Viegener and Wertheim 2007:
157
-58.
Breton, André
1969
Surrealist Manifestos
, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).
Brotchie, Alastair, and Mel Gooding
1991
Surrealist Games
(London: Redstone).
Bürger, Peter
1984
[1974]
Theory of the Avant-Garde
, translated by Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Cage, John
1990
I–VI (MethodStructureIntentionDisciplineNotationIndeterminacyInterpenetrationImitation DevotionCircumstanceVariableStructureNonunderstandingContingencyInconsistencyPerformance)
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Calvino, Italo
1981
[1979]
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
, translated by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).
Compagnon, Antoine
2005
Les antimodernes: De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes
(Paris: Gallimard).
Consenstein, Peter
2002
Literary Memory, Consciousness, and the Group Oulipo
(New York: Rodopi).
Dworkin, Craig Douglas
2008
The UbuWeb: Anthology of Conceptual Writing
,” www.ubu.com/concept (accessed January 8, 2008).
Eco, Umberto
1990
The Limits of Interpretation
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Flores, Angel, ed.
2000
The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry: From Nerval to Valéry in English Translation
(New York: Anchor).
Garréta, Anne F.
1986
Sphinx
(Paris: Grasset).
2002
Pas un jour
(Paris: Grasset).
Gillot, Arnoud
1999
“La notion d'écrilecture à travers les revues de poésie électronique KAOS et alire (1989–1995),” in
Littérature, informatique, lecture. De la lecture assistée par ordinateur à la lecture interactive
, edited by Alain Vuillemin and Michel Lenoble,
173
-86 (Limoges, France: PULIM).
James, Alison
2009
Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press).
Jouet, Jacques
2000
Poèmes de métro
(Paris: P.O.L.).
Kenner, Hugh
1987
The Mechanical Muse
(Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Magné, Bernard
1999
Georges Perec
(Paris: Nathan).
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2002
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1980
[1914]
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(Paris: PUF).
Mathews, Harry, and Alistair Brotchie, eds.
2005
[1998]
Oulipo Compendium
(London: Atlas).
Motte, Warren
2003
[1986]
Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature
(Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive).
2007
“Christine Montalbetti's Engaging Narrations,”
French Forum
32
(1–2):
189
-213.
Pearson, Roger
1996
Unfolding Mallarmé
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Perec, Georges
1969
La disparition
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1972
Les revenentes
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1987
[1978]
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, translated by David Bellos (Boston: Godine).
Perloff, Marjorie
1991
Radical Artifice
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press).
Peterson, R. A.
1982
“Five Constraints on the Production of Culture: Law, Technology, Market, Organizational Structure, and Occupational Careers,”
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“The Philosophy of Composition,”
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163
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2002
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(Paris: Gallimard),
5
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Poucel, Jean-Jacques, curator
2006
“Oulipo: Explore, Expose, X-po,” D
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, no. 8, www.drunkenboat.com/db8/index.html.
Queneau, Raymond
1961
Cent mille milliards de poèmes
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15
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1965
[1937] “Technique du roman,” in
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,
27
-33 (Paris: Gallimard). Translated by Jordan Stump as “Technique of the Novel,” in Letters, Numbers, Forms: Essays, 1928–70 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 26–29.
Rancière, Jacques
2007
Politique de la littérature
(Paris: Galilée).
Rasula, Jed, and Steve McCaffery, eds.
2001
Imagining Language
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Ricardou, Jean
1967
Problèmes du nouveau roman
(Paris: Seuil).
1971
Pour une théorie du nouveau roman
(Paris: Seuil).
1978
Nouveaux problèmes du roman
(Paris: Seuil).
Ricardou, Jean, and Françoise Van Rossum-Guyon, eds.
1972
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, 2 vols. (Paris: Union Générale d'Éditions).
Roubaud, Jacques
1990
[1986]
Some Thing Black
, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive).
1991
[1989]
The Great Fire of London
, translated by Dominic Di Bernardi (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive).
2005
[1998] “
Oulipo and Combinatorial Art
,” in Mathews and Brotchie 2005 [1998]:
37
-44.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky
1997
“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You,” in
Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction
, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
1
-37 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Simon, Claude
1969
La Bataille de Pharsale
(Paris: Minuit). Translated by Richard Howard as The Battle of Pharsalus (New York: Braziller, 1971).
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2007
Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Thomas, Jean-Jacques
1979
“Chances Aren't: Roubaud's Numerical Poe-Tricks,”
Substance
23
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Viegener, Mathias, and Christine Wertheim, eds.
2007
The Noulipian Analects
(Los Angeles: Les Figues).
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