Exercises in style

The plot of Exercises in Styleis simple: a man gets into an argument with another passenger on a bus. However, this anecdote is told 99 more times, each in a radically different style, as a sonnet, an opera, in slang, and with many more permutations. This virtuoso set of variations is a linguistic rust-remover, and a guide to literary forms.

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dhosekMay 2022

The Raymond Queneau Exercises in Style is a delightful introduction to OuLiPo. It takes the same story and tells it in 99 different ways (including N+7).

To me, a lot of what the OuLiPo constraints do is to free one’s writing voice from the worn routes that it might take without intervention. Doing an N+7 transpose on a text can open up new way of looking at that text since the nouns have been arbitrarily replaced and you see how the verbs and other auxiliaries work in the writing. My writing often has a subtle undercurrent of OuLiPo happening in it (e.g., the novel I’m revising started with a vague notion of story and 29 chapter titles taken from the Passover Haggadah. A similar shorter piece I wrote, “The Norton Anthology of Self-Destructive Behaviors” [https://uploads.documents.cimpress.io/v1/uploads/151c2c51-d2...], began with a list of self-destructive behaviors and a story emerged from those).

Another great overview is The OuLiPo compendium http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0974355437/donhosek which presents most of the major OuLiPo works, authors and games in encyclopedic format.

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networkedApr 2017

I haven't read 99 Ways to Tell a Story, but when I read Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style about a decade ago (in English translation) I was delighted by it. Though I have not reread the book recently, 2008-me would heartily recommend it.

I've noticed that exercises in style (in writing or in visual art, comics, video games and what have you) and practices like constrained writing and their analogues in other media seem to resonate with a certain type of computer/math nerd. It affects even those who would rather not associate with anything described as "literary". I think being a nerd predisposes one towards enjoying a kind of formalism in art.

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carlobMay 2016

It's funny you should mention translations as different: when Umberto Eco translated Queneau's Exercises in Style he had to rewrite more than a few. Many would consider all translations of that book as rewritings, new exercises. Some don't even have the same number of pieces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercises_in_Style

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