Our Beautiful Heroine

by Jacques Roubaud

Our Beautiful Heroine by Roubaud, Jacques This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0879512903
• ISBN13: 9780879512903
• Release Date: October 1987
• Publisher: Overlook Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

Oulipo

Oulipo nevertheless begun in 1960, by the mathematician Francois Le Lionnais and novelist Raymond Queneau, as a experimental group devoted to writing that used mathematical formulas and linguistic games. This group valued the writing of some of the most eccentric, anti-mimetic, writers of the past: Laurence Sterne, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, Ronald Firbank, Gertrude Stein, and of course Raymond Roussel. Roussel, the champion of the imagination, travelled all over the world, yet stayed locked in his room or in an ancient mobile home for fear that experience might impinge and influence his writing. Much more radical than their predecessors, Oulipo members would use more restricting rules to produce works. Harry Mathews suggests that this is a way of freedom of the imagination. Mathews, who detests the notion of automatic writing which he thinks is naive and impotent, once said that "why not write within a system of restraint (like a sonata), that the writer chooses beforehand, rather than be a slave of a system that one is ignorant of." Some of the outrageous works that have appeared over the years are many, to the shock of everyone. Queneau has written One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, a book of 10 sonnets arranged in strips so that each line of each poem can be changed and altered, living up to the title. Perec has written a book that is a palindrome, as well as a book called The Disappearance which does not use the letter "e." Italo Calvino has written a book which reflects on itself: If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. He also wrote Mr. Palomar, where the narrative is controlled, more descriptive or more meditative, by an elaborate numerical system based on 3. Lionnais has invented the n-7 algorithm where you can take any passage and replace the nouns with the seventh nouns in the dictionary that follows them. Mathews has his own algorithm where you take four words and exchange letters to make new words. Mathews has also taken familiar saying and shifted their parts: "When in Rome/ Few chosen,/ Six of one/ Are another man's poison." Is that confusing enough? Sounds like something that will fade as fast as any other trend, but Oulipo have been around for almost thirty years. And their members: Queneau, Lionnais, Calvino, Perec, Mathews, and Jacques Roubaud are some of the writers with the strongest reputations in contemporary fiction. Many people would object to this type of literature, but those are people that are putting certain demands on fiction. Instead of pursuing the truth and fictional revelations, Oulipo writers wants the reader to pursue the game itself. Storytelling should be more important than what is being said. Many readers feel cheated, but they are too willing to come to the conclusion. Mathews, and other Oulipians, have used the devices of mystery writers to get the reader initiated in the book. Like Mathews' The Conversions the reader feels that something mysterious is happening but he cannot put his finger on it. Ma