Scope and Contents Oulipo is an acronym for the French word meaning "Workshop for Potential Literature." The group was formed in 1960 by Raymond Queneau, a celebrated novelist and poet who was not an inconsequential amateur mathematician and his friend, Francois Le Lionnais, a chessmaster who shared his friend's love for mathematics. Queneau had been struggling with a literary task of immense complexity, his 100 trillion poems and asked Le Lionnais for practical assistance.When they discusses this problem, their conversations turned to the possibility of incorporating mathematical structures into the process of literary creation. Queneau had ready been doing this in his novels, but no one noticed until he mentioned it. Queneau and Le Lionnais soon widened their investigations beyond mathematics to include all forms of artificial restriction in literature. As an Oulipean term, restriction means a constraining method or system or rule that can be precisely defined. All literature is limited by the...