Renowned “word crafter“ and Oulipian Daniel Levin Becker will present “re: Composition—Of Books and Bots” on Thursday, May 7 from 8 to 10 p.m. in the Weitz Center for Creativity Cinema at Carleton College. Based in San Francisco, Levin Becker is a member of the French literary-mathematical collective, Oulipo, a group of Parisian writers and scientists who use strict mathematical rules to generate literature.
Founded in 1960, Oulipo, an acronym for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle or "Workshop for Potential Literature,” is considered one of literature’s quirkiest movements. The international organization of writers, artists, and scientists embraces formal and procedural constraints to explore literature’s possibilities. The group is perhaps best known for member Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition (A Void), a 311-page whodunit that recounts the disappearance of the letter e from the world—without ever using the letter e.
Drawn to the Oulipo’s mystique, as a student at Yale Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study and work with the organization and traveled to Paris. From his perspective, the Oulipians and their projects were at once bizarre and utterly compelling, sharing Levin Becker’s love for games, puzzles, and language play. He was eventually offered membership, becoming its youngest member (and only the second American to be admitted to the group).
In his Carleton lecture, Levin Becker will discuss Oulipo’s origins and mission, using creative examples and theoretical touchstones to convey how Oulipian values react with, and against, the shifting substance of text today. From a present day perspective, Levin Becker will demonstrate what Oulipian thought means now, as both an avant-garde tradition and a humanistic affirmation of the mind’s own technologies.
Levin Becker is the author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (2012, Harvard University Press), a history of Oulipo and his role within it. Fluent in French, he has translated numerous French texts to English. He is also the reviews editor for The Believer magazine and regularly contributes as a music critic for the San Francisco Weekly. Learn more about Levin Becker, or “dlb,” online at www.dinnerlunchbreakfast.com. More about Oulipo can be found at www.oulipo.net.
This event is part of an interdisciplinary lecture series sponsored by the Carleton College Department of Music. Re: composition invites audiences to think synthetically at the intersection of production, technology, and society. The series invites guest artist-scholars to share their idiosyncratic stews of apparatus, context, and creation to exemplify the uncounted ways that critical inquiry and creativity might mutually fuel one another.
The Weitz Center for Creativity is located at Third and College Streets in Northfield. For more information, including disability accommodations, call (507) 222-4347.
