Nick Sousanis, a Columbia University doctorate candidate, turned in a less than typical doctorate. Instead of a paper, Sousanis created a graphic novel about the relationship between words and pictures in literature.
Harvard University Press published the work, which is called Unflattening. Here is more about the book from the book’s Amazon listing:
The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.
You can read an excerpt here. (Via BoingBoing).
This week’s podcast features a special discussion with Daniel Levin Becker, author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Liteature, a history of of the Oulipo, past, present, and future. For the uninitiated, the Oulipo is a 50-year-old group of writers and mathematicians and others interested in the idea of “potential” literature. At times highly technical and esoteric in their thinking about literature, the group also has a sort of prankster streak, which comes out in the liveliness of many of their writings. Some of the most famous works produced by Oulipian writers include Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler . . ., and Harry Mathews’s Cigarettes. (Also see: all of Raymond Queneau and Jacques Roubaud, the works of Jacques Jouet, and those of Paul Fournel.)
To supplement this week’s podcast, I thought I would post the review I wrote of Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels on GoodReads. Matt Rowe is planning on writing up a full review of this book for Three Percent, but for the time being, here you go:
In reading this charming book, I tried to recall how I first fell in love with the Oulipo. It must’ve been through Dalkey Archive, and probably had to do with one of the wild-eyed booksellers at Schuler Books & Music, but I just couldn’t remember . . . At first I assumed it was through Harry Mathews, whose books were being reissued by Dalkey at the time; it jus as easily could’ve been through Perec’s A Void, since that’s the most patently Oulipian work available in English and I remember pushing it on customers all the time. (And now do the same with my students.)
Then it suddenly came to me: When I was living in Grand Rapids, I went to a used bookstore just to look around, and found a mass market, old-school version of Raymond Queneau’s Zazie in the Metro. For those who don’t know, this part of Michigan is loaded with Calvinists and their moral baggage, so it isn’t all that surprising that someone had scrawled across the title page of this book, condemning it as “erotic trash.” SOLD!
But even then, I didn’t really know what the Oulipo was. I mean, I got the concept—use constraints to write “potential” literature—and read almost everything I could get my hands on, but without the Wikipedia of today or knowledge of the French language, figuring out what this group of strange writers was all about was like solving a puzzle without any sort of picture to work off of.
Eventually, the Oulipo Compendium came out as did Oulipo: A Primer, and all the pieces/techniques—lipograms, S+7, complicated algorithms, x mistakes y for z—started to come together. That said, until reading “Many Subtle Channels,” I don’t think I had a sense of how the Oulipo as a group has functioned for the past 50-plus years.
As a member of the Oulipo, and the “slave” who organized its archives, Daniel Levin Becker is in the unique position that he can create a context for this group of writers who, as diverse as their are personality-wise, are connected by their love of puzzles, of new ways to generate texts, of learning, of seeking out puzzles, of creating the linguistic labyrinth from which they try to escape.
For anyone who isn’t already steeped in Oulipian lore, I highly suggest you read this book, then pick up Queneau’s Exercises in Style, Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, and Mathews’s Cigarettes. After you read all of those—and possibly some of the info you can find online—you’re likely to be hooked on this way of writing and reading for life.
What’s interesting about this book to readers already familiar with the Oulipo and its crazy fun literary stylings is the way in which Levin Becker builds a context around the development of the Workshop while bringing up some really interesting questions about the nature of Oulipian writing: Is it better to reveal the constraints or make the reader figure them out? If the reader knows the constraint, is that the end of their interpretation/enjoyment of the book? How has the group’s dynamics and goals shifted from the post-WWII years to 2012? What’s the point of all this madness?
There’s a lot of great stuff i
I don’t read a lot of critical/academic books, but I can’t wait to get my hands on Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, which is coming out from Harvard University Press next month:
What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau—and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature’s quirkiest movements.
An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature’s possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for “workshop for potential literature”) is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec’s novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo’s mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris. He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker’s love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman’s delight in Russian literature in The Possessed.
And with Jacques Roubaud’s Mathematics coming out from Dalkey Archive coming out this spring as well, it’s as good a time as any to go on an Oulipian bender. . . .
In the name of giving credit where it’s due, I’d like to do something a little different today and highlight some quality content on other university press blogs. Long live academic publishing!
From Columbia University Press: Judith Butler – Implicated and Enraged
From Harvard University Press: Killing for Coal, in Prime-Time
From MIT Press: And it’s root, root, root for the vector!
From New York University Press: Finding Faith on the Internet
From Princeton University Press: Birding in the City
From University of North Carolina Press: Hummus and Bugles
From Yale University Press: Cartooning is an Art
From University of California Press: How Climate Change Damages Our Health
Harvard University Press will translate works by Chinese author Liu Xiaobo, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner. Publication for the untitled anthology is set for 2012.
Xiaobo (pictured) writes poetry, essays, and social commentary about political reform in China. The academic press has enlisted Perry Link (chancellorial chair in teaching across disciplines at the University of California, Riverside) to supervise a translation team. Link had this statement: “Until he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Liu Xiaobo was little known in the West. This collection offers to the reader of English the full range of his astute and penetrating analyses of culture, politics, and society in China today.”
So far, Xiaobo has served almost two years of his 11-year prison sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.” Liu Xia, his wife, has been put under house arrest.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Nick Sousanis, a Columbia University doctorate candidate, turned in a less than typical doctorate. Instead of a paper, Sousanis created a graphic novel about the relationship between words and pictures in literature.
