Which literary group, founded in France in 1960, explores writing through formal constraints such as lipograms?

Fact

Did you know?

Oulipo, short for the French name Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, was founded in 1960 around Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. The group brings writers and mathematicians together to devise formal rules that reveal new literary possibilities. A lipogram, which excludes a chosen letter from a text, is one of the constraints its members have explored. Georges Perec supplied a famous example with “La Disparition”, a novel written without the letter e. For Oulipo, a constraint is not simply an obstacle to creativity. It can force a writer to discover unexpected structures, vocabulary and narrative paths that completely unrestricted writing might never have produced.