With (and Without) Constraints

Uses of Constraint

In France and elsewhere, since 1960, there is a group of writers and others, the Oulipo, whose members don’t “write literature under constraints”–an oft-heard approximation–but seek out usable constraints so that literature is written. As for the constraints, the Oulipo brings them back (sometimes exhumes them) from the past, or imports them from far away, or else invents them piecemeal, notably with recourse to mathematics.