Oulipo

Below find a link to an article from the magazine The Believer on Oulipo, a literary group whose members generate strange permutations on language by imposing artificial constraints on their writing. (Georges Perec and Italo Calvino are among the group’s most notable members.) As the author of the article observes, these constraints differ from more run-of-the-mill formal devices only in the degree to which they limit a writer’s options. The principle is the same: the form “de-familiarizes” language, makes it more vivid, while at the same time enhancing or undercutting its meaning. Yet Oulipo’s works, by commenting on and delighting in the artificiality of literary conventions, are by their very nature meta-literature as well. Their underlying message echoes Jesus’ remarks on the subject of the Sabbath: forms were made for man, not man for forms.

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200609/?read=article_beha