Raymond Queneau
(1903 - 1976)
Raymond Queneau studied philosophy at the University of Paris, graduating in 1926, and later worked as an editor at Gallimard and director of the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade. In 1960 he cofounded Oulipo, the Workshop of Potential Literature, in order to seek out “new forms and structures” for writers, believing that formal constraint could liberate new creative energy. “The classical playwright who writes his tragedy observing a certain number of familiar rules,” he wrote, “is freer than the poet who writes that which comes into his head and who is the slave of other rules of which he is ignorant.”
