Oulipo: The Creative Beauty of Constraints [Erich Schweikher]
All Levels. Founded in France in the 1960s, Oulipo (loosely translated to “workshop of potential literature”), unites language with mathematics to create constrained writing defined by set structures / patterns. The constraints are a means to trigger ideas that may otherwise be ignored during the traditional writing process. The course will focus on one constraint each week. Possible constraints: lipograms, univocalism (writing that excludes all but one vowel), sonnet palindromes, and snowball (writing in which each successive word is a letter longer).