Author: Lara Palmquist

The Formal Imagination of Oulipo
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The Formal Imagination of Oulipo

Founded in 1960 by a collective of French mathematicians and writers, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), or Oulipo, was established to identify new forms of writing using numerical and alphabetical constraints. Early member Georges Perec, for example, structured his novel Life A User’s Manuel according to the Knight’s Tour algorithm, in which…

The Physical Body in the Psychological Novel: On Knut Hamsun’s ‘Hunger’
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The Physical Body in the Psychological Novel: On Knut Hamsun’s ‘Hunger’

Norwegian author Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) is widely regarded as one of the pioneering works of Modernist fiction. Telling a semi-autobiographical story of a starving writer’s decent into madness, the novel is celebrated for its deft explorations of the mind. Notably, Hamsun’s innovative use of internal monologue and stream-of-consciousness directly influenced major writers such as…

The Narrowed Divide: Of Stylists, Shape-Shifters, and Multiple Aesthetics

  Our collective understanding of how a story, poem, or essay should operate remains in constant flux; every sentence is a new description of language, every piece of writing, a new commentary on art. In this sense, any shared definition of storytelling is best left unresolved, unless we are to say a story is simply…