...Christian Biet; Karel Vanhaesebrouck This article investigates the way the notion of constraint could be extended to theater studies and theater history, focusing on the case of French classical tragedy in the seventeenth century. Can classical poetics be regarded as a set of constraints? Rather...

...Jan Baetens; Jean-Jacques Poucel 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...

... Bernstein's 2005 libretto for Brian Ferneyhough's opera “about” Walter Benjamin, Shadowtime , visual poetics, Oulipo constraint, and citation from Benjamin's own writings come together to produce a playful but also profound “poem including history” (Pound 1954: 86) for our current moment. At once homage...

... for such constructions may be not the global literary commerce envisioned by Goethe and adopted by Karl Marx, not the romantic tradition of poets as world legislators, and not the current model of a “world republic of letters.” The model adopted in this essay, rather, is the literary practice of writing under constraint...

...Warren Motte Constraint is often conceived of as a restrictive process, one that severely limits the field of possibilities available to a writer. While it is undoubtedly true that the use of systematic artifice and writing rules in a literary text does narrow an author's choices (one cannot use...

...Jan Baetens This essay deals with the question of the multiple constraints that determine the production of highly commercialized literature, namely, novelization. As a literary genre, novelization is easy to define: it is the novelistic adaptation of an original film or, more specifically...

...) binds constraints and potentiality together like this: “Oulipian constraints provide the rules of the language game . . . whose ‘innings’ (texts composed according to its rules) are virtually unlimited and represent linguistic combinations developed from a small number of necessarily independent...

...Richard Deming This article investigates the philosophical implications intrinsic to writing that expressly uses constraints and that thereby intentionally limits an author's freedom. Constrained writing imposes formal conditions and strictures as a response to the existential angst—aesthetic...

... with and significantly alters the Oulipian understanding of constraints as axioms that precede composition. Looking closely at Poe's earlier essay “Maelzel's Chess-Player” (1836) and the way it anticipates more recent debates in artificial intelligence, I show how Poe's (1984d [1846]: 13) constraint, as stated...

... texts are examined in some detail: a short acrostic poem by Jackson Mac Low; Harry Mathews's exposition of “Mathews's Algorithm,” a method for permuting texts; a text by Raymond Federman that observes certain rigid formal-compositional constraints; and a prose poem by Charles O. Hartman, which...

...Jacques Roubaud An elaboration of the Oulipian practice of writing under constraint, this lecture illuminates select philosophical arguments in a manner that exposes François Le Lionnais's conception of universal potentiality. To illustrate the advised position to adopt with respect to composition...

...Dirk de Geest; An Goris This article broadens the concept of “constrained writing” by applying it to a less prestigious domain of literature, namely, popular romance novels. In order to find out how constraints play a role in writing and publishing such commercial texts, a corpus of handbooks...

... and contextual aspects of the archive would be taken into account not just as contingent factors but as part of the exercise of calibrating the cultural reach of cognition: what it is capable of, and its constraints, in different local ecologies. The literary archive, it will be argued, offers...

... to the poem’s insistent violations both of consistent conceptual structure and of “directionality” constraints on metaphoric projections from one conceptual domain to another. These violations upset deeply ingrained habits of conceptualization, frustrating the normally automatic processes that generate more...

...Peter Smyth Abstract Italo Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies is unique among his later novels for failing to uphold the rules and constraints that he was increasingly fond of imposing on his works of fiction. To explain the novel's structural failure, this essay puts aside the framework...

... and aesthetic ends. The argument is propounded in four stages. The first stage deals with an issue of poetic prosody, foregrounding the conflict between the influence-hunting and the cognitive-constraint approaches to the same problem. The second stage adduces an instance of how, “in the process of repeated...

...Chris Andrews Certain members of the Oulipo, notably Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, have used constraints to encode meanings as well as to structure and generate their works. Such formal encoding recruits and trains a readership prone to paranoid interpretation, a tendency opposed in recent...

... of cognitive capitalism, the increasing casualization of intellectual labor creates the conditions for unstructured, unrestrained, and deterritorialized flows of thought that escape the constraints placed on those in the institution. By harnessing literature’s subversive potential, literary studies can use...

... metrics like “free verse,” “accentual verse,” and “iambic pentameter,” the article suggests that its rhythms arise instead from a rich and complex vernacular style that cannot be explained by the constraints of Anglo-American versification. How Not to Introduce Blues Prosody: Langston Hughes...

... that the reader must recognize but an unexpected and unannounced void, namely, the absence of the letter E from the entire text. Framing this exercise in literary constraint as a modernist mystery novel, Perec aligns the stakes of noticing, or not noticing, his missing letter with postwar debates about...