L'atelier · on writing itself
The Craft
On writing itself — the sentence, constraint, the marvellous, and memory as material.
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01
Constraint and the Oulipo
The Oulipo's great paradox — that rules set writing free. Georges Perec's novel without the letter e, Queneau's Exercises in Style, and constraint as a form of play.
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02
The Surrealists' Marvellous
André Breton, automatic writing and le merveilleux — how the Surrealists tried to write straight from the unconscious, and what they left to French poetry and prose.
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03
The French Sentence
What makes a French sentence French — clarity as a national ideal, the long Proustian period against the flat declarative, and style as the deepest form of thought.
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04
Memory as Material
The French art of remembering on the page — Nerval, Proust and Patrick Modiano — how memory, half-lit and unreliable, became the great subject of French prose.