First off, I am sorry for the strange white highlighting in the previous post. I'm not sure why it did that, but I can't figure out how to get rid of it.
In any case, I think that in this post, I'll explain a little about how I am preparing to be abroad for a year. For those of you who don't know, I'll be an exchange student at the École Normale Supérieure, essentially France's Ivy League equivalent. Though, it is not an exact equivalent—the entire system in France doesn't match with ours in the US. Let me explain how it works:
1) The students who go to the ENS do not go there for their "undergraduate degree" like you might think. They go to an intensive two-year "classe préparatoire" (preparatory classes). The point of these classes is first and foremost to give all the students the same preparation for their future graduate work. They take the same classes, the same exams, all in accordance with what they wish to study. The courses prepare the students to take the examination that gets them into a "Grande École" (such as the ENS).
There are pros and cons to this system. The obvious pro is that all the students who eventually go on to study have the same exact background, which must facilitate teaching to a certain extent. In America, students who go to major universities all come in with different levels of education—some from public schools, some from private schools, some homeschooled. I know that when I started at Johns Hopkins, I felt woefully unprepared to take literature courses based on how little I had studied in high school. Even starting graduate school, I felt underprepared. Although I had been devouring every French book I could get my hands on, I hadn't taken courses in every century of French literature, I had only spent about 5 months in France, and I had only been taking French literature courses (as opposed to language courses) for about two years). On the other hand, there are French students in my PhD program at Princeton, who have been taking French courses their whole lives, who have been speaking French their whole lives, and who know their culture and history much better than I ever will—because they have lived it. That sort of uncertainty in one's background never happens in France.
No for the cons: all of the students have the same background. That is not to say that they are identical, but with exactly the same formation, the school takes and produces classically trained students. Unlike at American universities, there is very little diversity in any sense of the word: no economic diversity (most of the students are quite well off, coming from academic families as well), no racial diversity (the students who can afford this sort of preparation are generally from major cities), no diversity of ideas (the students who are able to pass the entrance exams generally come from the same few exclusive preparatory classes).
2) The ENS is not a university. It is a public "Grand Ecole," established shortly after the Revolution (1789). It has a very lovely building in the 5th arrondissement (the Latin Quarter), near the Pantheon, on the rue d'Ulm. The courtyard is one of my favorite places in Paris. In the center, there is a little fountain with goldfish. They're called the "Ernests" and the courtyard is aptly named the Cour aux Ernests. It has practice rooms, and housing (a limited amount, unlike American schools), clubs and activities, but the entire concept is a little different. Students there are autonomous and expected to be. Being physically present on the "campus" (if you can even call it that) is not necessary, or even really important at all. The courses are seminar style and you don't need to validate them by taking an exam or writing a final paper if you don't want to. It's a graduate school, where the students are there to do more independent work. To finish their "licence" or undergraduate degree, they take courses at the Universities in their first year. For me, this system will be fine. I'm beyond the coursework phase in my PhD. But, it will come with its own unique set of challenges as well. Clearly I won't be on the same continent as my adviser, so we will correspond via email. The library resources at the ENS and in France are not quite as user friendly as at Princeton. In Princeton, I can get any book or article I need in days. In France, things take longer. But hey, I'll manage.
3) The classes: while I am not required to take class, I don't see the harm in shopping around a bit. I'd love to learn another language while I'm there, for instance. Before Paris, I will be going to Berlin for a month and a half to spend some time with my friend Eileen, practice my German, and just get to know a new city/country. I've been taking German language classes all year, and so I'm finally about an intermediate level. This will be my first time spending a significant time in a country where my language skills aren't quite there yet, so it will be frustrating, but hopefully rewarding. At the ENS, I think it might be a good idea to take a Latin class. The French language courses aren't as intensive as American ones, so a dead language seems like a good bet since I'm sure attaining a decent reading knowledge in Latin wouldn't be too difficult given my French and Italian knowledge. Latin isn't horribly important for the OuLiPo, but I do believe it is important for anyone studying French literature since most Europeans (at least, certainly most French people) have some exposure to Latin throughout their educations. I would like to learn Hebrew, but I think that might be a bit difficult in France to find. We'll see, though. Other than language courses, there is a course on surrealism that seems intriguing, and also an introduction to Italian literature, both of which might help me with my own work. Raymond Queneau, the founder of the OuLiPo, was a surrealist early on, and his later aversion to the group and their practices would be a huge inspiration (so to speak, since the OuLiPo doesn't believe in inspiration) for what the OuLiPo would not be. Doing a course on that would help me learn more contextually about what preceded the OuLiPo, framing my dissertation better.
And, that is what I know so far! It should be an interesting year at the ENS and I simply cannot wait to be there!
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Monday, May 26, 2014
Ella Minnow Pea, Mark Dunn
The past few days, I just read an adorable little constrained novel called Ella Minnow Pea. Go ahead, say it out loud. That's right! You got it: LMNOP. It is an epistolary novel (told entirely through characters writing letters to one another, in the tradition of Les liaisons dangereuses, which wasn't the first, but is definitely my favorite), but with the added bonus that it is a progressively lipogrammatic novel. To explain what this means, let me back up a bit and talk for a minute about my dissertation.
The group that I study (the OuLiPo or Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) is a collection of French writers/mathematicians/computer scientists/etc. who chose to write sous contrainte. Basically, they choose a constraint and write a book using it, for the very simple reason that all literature is constrained whether or not the author is aware of it. Choosing ones own constraint, according to them, makes an author freer, since he is not a slave to rules of which he is ignorant. Their most famous constraint is a lipogram, which comes from the Greek λειπογράμματος for leaving out one letter. While it is not a new constraint (indeed, the Ancient Greeks did it, and so have many since—consciously and unconsciously), the OuLiPo's theorization is what makes its particular use of the constraint unique. They understand what they do in a mathematical way, a conceptualization that comes in part from axiomatic theory in mathematics. While I won't get into this now (since I'm sure I'll get to it when doing research on this), what is important is this: a constraint for the OuLiPo is rigorous, easily defined, and demonstrable. By rigorous, I mean that there is some level of difficulty (obviously, a lipogram's difficulty varies depending on the letter one chooses to leave out); a lipogram is easily defined, clearly, as I just did; by demonstrable, I wish to say that were one to write a novel without a letter, that author will have demonstrated the feasibility of the constraint, or that it is indeed possible. Reading a lipogram is different than reading any old text. I mean, not only is reading it a verification that the constraint was strictly followed, but there is the constant question of why.
The OuLiPo text that follows this constraint is Georges Perec's La disparition. The author not only wrote the entire book without the most commonly used vowel in the French language (E, which can be found in about 80% of French words), but he also wrote the book about the loss of the letter E. That is to say, not only are there 26 chapters of which the 5th is missing, but the main character, Anton Voyl, also disappears, just like the E's in his name (Voyl is the French word for vowel without the E's). Beyond that, the entire novel speaks of the constraint—not only at key moments, but always. In this case, the constraint is not only the compositional principle of the text, but also the content.
This brings me back to the book I just read, Ella Minnow Pea, the progressively lipogrammatic novel. I learned about this book from the Princeton translation luncheon series, run by my advisor, David Bellos. The novel tells the story of an island of word-loving people who owe their existence to the inventor of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," Nollop. You might be wondering, what is a pangram? It is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. You'll note that this is a particularly short one, commonly used for typists to check that every key on their typewriter worked. But one day, when the Z on the sentence falls off of the commemoratory statue, the island's government interprets this as a message from Nollop himself, forbidding the use of the letter Z. But soon, other letters begin to fall, and communication on the island becomes more and more complicated. In the end, the only way the inhabitants can find to circumvent the government's ridiculous interpretation is to come up with a new pangram that is only 32 letters long.
Now, I won't give away the end, but I will say that it was a delightful read. Luckily for me, I will get to read it again, in French! So, I mentioned that I learned of this book from a translation luncheon, where Marie-Claude Plourde had been invited to speak about her experience translating the novel into French. You may ask: why would someone be invited to talk about the experience of translating a single book? Well, because with a progressively lipogrammatic novel, translation poses very interesting problems about the nature of language itself. In the original, Ella Minnow Pea, the first letter lost was Z, which is not a particularly important loss for the language. Bees were unable to speak, but getting around that issue isn't impossible. The second letter to go, however, was Q. In French, Q is indispensable for asking questions: qui, quoi, qu'est-ce que, que, ce que, ce qui, all of these extremely common pronouns and question words disappear. The Q is much more common in French than in English. This complicates a removal that perhaps was not as difficult in English. Plourde's talk focused on this differences, how she circumvented them (sometimes by changing the letter that fell, sometimes by thematically changing bits of the book, etc.). The greatest difficulty, according to her, was finding equivalents for the pangrams that were the appropriate number of letters. I have her book back in Princeton and when I return tomorrow, I will happily start reading her translation! Should I also mention that mine is a signed copy? Yeah...I have a few autographed books, and I'll be sure to write about them!
To conclude, I'd just like to quote the end of Ella Minnow Pea, a quote that I think sums up something inherent to constrained writing: "...any one of us could have come up with such a sentence [that is, the new 32-word pangram that they come across totally by accident at the end of the book]. We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters." (199) The fact that the discovery of the shorter pangram at the end is mere happenstance highlights something about the OuLiPo and their methods—while all writing is constrained (whether the author is aware of it or not), understanding the constraints and how they function helps us understand something about the way we think, the way we write, and the nature of language itself. And this is all without even beginning to talk about the mathematics!
PS: For those who find these ideas interesting and would like to read the book, here is the link to it on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Ella-Minnow-Pea-Novel-Letters/dp/0385722435
Enjoy!
The French translation is difficult to get in the United States (I bought it directly from the translator). But here is the link to her personal website: http://www.binome.ca/
And here is the link to the French Amazon page for her translation: http://www.amazon.fr/LIsle-Lettr%C3%A9e-Un-roman-lettres/dp/B00CHIJHQQ
The group that I study (the OuLiPo or Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) is a collection of French writers/mathematicians/computer scientists/etc. who chose to write sous contrainte. Basically, they choose a constraint and write a book using it, for the very simple reason that all literature is constrained whether or not the author is aware of it. Choosing ones own constraint, according to them, makes an author freer, since he is not a slave to rules of which he is ignorant. Their most famous constraint is a lipogram, which comes from the Greek λειπογράμματος for leaving out one letter. While it is not a new constraint (indeed, the Ancient Greeks did it, and so have many since—consciously and unconsciously), the OuLiPo's theorization is what makes its particular use of the constraint unique. They understand what they do in a mathematical way, a conceptualization that comes in part from axiomatic theory in mathematics. While I won't get into this now (since I'm sure I'll get to it when doing research on this), what is important is this: a constraint for the OuLiPo is rigorous, easily defined, and demonstrable. By rigorous, I mean that there is some level of difficulty (obviously, a lipogram's difficulty varies depending on the letter one chooses to leave out); a lipogram is easily defined, clearly, as I just did; by demonstrable, I wish to say that were one to write a novel without a letter, that author will have demonstrated the feasibility of the constraint, or that it is indeed possible. Reading a lipogram is different than reading any old text. I mean, not only is reading it a verification that the constraint was strictly followed, but there is the constant question of why.
The OuLiPo text that follows this constraint is Georges Perec's La disparition. The author not only wrote the entire book without the most commonly used vowel in the French language (E, which can be found in about 80% of French words), but he also wrote the book about the loss of the letter E. That is to say, not only are there 26 chapters of which the 5th is missing, but the main character, Anton Voyl, also disappears, just like the E's in his name (Voyl is the French word for vowel without the E's). Beyond that, the entire novel speaks of the constraint—not only at key moments, but always. In this case, the constraint is not only the compositional principle of the text, but also the content.
This brings me back to the book I just read, Ella Minnow Pea, the progressively lipogrammatic novel. I learned about this book from the Princeton translation luncheon series, run by my advisor, David Bellos. The novel tells the story of an island of word-loving people who owe their existence to the inventor of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," Nollop. You might be wondering, what is a pangram? It is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. You'll note that this is a particularly short one, commonly used for typists to check that every key on their typewriter worked. But one day, when the Z on the sentence falls off of the commemoratory statue, the island's government interprets this as a message from Nollop himself, forbidding the use of the letter Z. But soon, other letters begin to fall, and communication on the island becomes more and more complicated. In the end, the only way the inhabitants can find to circumvent the government's ridiculous interpretation is to come up with a new pangram that is only 32 letters long.
Now, I won't give away the end, but I will say that it was a delightful read. Luckily for me, I will get to read it again, in French! So, I mentioned that I learned of this book from a translation luncheon, where Marie-Claude Plourde had been invited to speak about her experience translating the novel into French. You may ask: why would someone be invited to talk about the experience of translating a single book? Well, because with a progressively lipogrammatic novel, translation poses very interesting problems about the nature of language itself. In the original, Ella Minnow Pea, the first letter lost was Z, which is not a particularly important loss for the language. Bees were unable to speak, but getting around that issue isn't impossible. The second letter to go, however, was Q. In French, Q is indispensable for asking questions: qui, quoi, qu'est-ce que, que, ce que, ce qui, all of these extremely common pronouns and question words disappear. The Q is much more common in French than in English. This complicates a removal that perhaps was not as difficult in English. Plourde's talk focused on this differences, how she circumvented them (sometimes by changing the letter that fell, sometimes by thematically changing bits of the book, etc.). The greatest difficulty, according to her, was finding equivalents for the pangrams that were the appropriate number of letters. I have her book back in Princeton and when I return tomorrow, I will happily start reading her translation! Should I also mention that mine is a signed copy? Yeah...I have a few autographed books, and I'll be sure to write about them!
To conclude, I'd just like to quote the end of Ella Minnow Pea, a quote that I think sums up something inherent to constrained writing: "...any one of us could have come up with such a sentence [that is, the new 32-word pangram that they come across totally by accident at the end of the book]. We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters." (199) The fact that the discovery of the shorter pangram at the end is mere happenstance highlights something about the OuLiPo and their methods—while all writing is constrained (whether the author is aware of it or not), understanding the constraints and how they function helps us understand something about the way we think, the way we write, and the nature of language itself. And this is all without even beginning to talk about the mathematics!
PS: For those who find these ideas interesting and would like to read the book, here is the link to it on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Ella-Minnow-Pea-Novel-Letters/dp/0385722435
Enjoy!
The French translation is difficult to get in the United States (I bought it directly from the translator). But here is the link to her personal website: http://www.binome.ca/
And here is the link to the French Amazon page for her translation: http://www.amazon.fr/LIsle-Lettr%C3%A9e-Un-roman-lettres/dp/B00CHIJHQQ
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Initial Constraint
Hello soon-to-be-faithful readers (I hope)!
My name is Natalie, and I'm a PhD student at Princeton University. I just finished my third year, successfully defended my dissertation proposal, and will soon be off to Paris for a year of research. I'm hoping it will be productive, and to keep you family/friends/random readers informed of my whereabouts and progress, I'm going to write a blog! I've done this before (see my other blogs: first from studying abroad in Paris in 2010, then from last summer in Paris/Urbino, and finally a little blog I made to write about Broadway musicals), but this one will be a little different.
While I do want to write about interesting experiences like I did in the other study abroad blogs, this time I actually want to focus on the studying. For that, I'm going to write about the books I'm reading, the scholars I meet, the OuLiPo meetings I go to, the transcriptions, the library visits, etc. While this may not sound interesting, I promise to make it as exciting as possible. In fact, I'll be participating in several fascinating projects, doing research on two different centuries, trying to bridge math and literature, and interacting with great scholars and authors. What's more, I'll be in a great cultural capital, where there are always museum exhibitions, concerts, operas, ballets, plays, and other things to do that, while perhaps not immediately applicable to my work, will no doubt enrich my work as well as my time abroad.
So, I think the main topic points for the blog will be as follows:
1) Life in Paris—this begins now, as I try to decide between staying in the free room that the ENS will provide me despite its obvious flaws (disgusting, co-ed bathrooms) and getting an expensive apartment or finding a roommate to share an apartment.
2) Academic life at the ENS—whether or not I choose to live there, I will be a pensionnaire étrangère, which is a fancy way of saying I will be affiliated with this Grande école. I'll not only have a student card, but I will probably attend a seminar or two, participate in their student groups (I believe they have an orchestra), their parties, their strange bar (k-fêt...I believe there is a blog post about it in my first blog), etc.
3) Library culture—this includes writing about books I'm currently reading (I think I'll write them like book reviews, so that anyone who is interested could read them as well and tell me what they think—in fact, please feel free to do that and comment!), some aspects of my dissertation, and also of course the library experience (which is quite different in France).
4) Conferences and Talks—I will be going to OuLiPo jeudis (monthly meetings) of course, but also hopefully presenting at conferences (so far, I know of one in Puerto Rico that I will be attending in October!), and also attending talks. The intellectual life at Princeton is incredible, but hopefully in Paris I will be hearing new ideas, new methodologies, and a different style of academics. Some talks in Paris when I studied abroad literally changed my life (George Steiner and the Oulipo jeudis, specifically).
5) Trips—I'm hoping to travel when I'm there. First, I'm going to Berlin, which will be a new linguistic experience (my German is nowhere near as good as my French or Italian). And from there, I can see a new part of Europe I don't know very well (Berlin is the only German city I've ever seen, and I've never been east of there).
And, that's the plan! I'm sure it will be an exciting year, and hopefully I'll be able to write this as often as I'd like!
My name is Natalie, and I'm a PhD student at Princeton University. I just finished my third year, successfully defended my dissertation proposal, and will soon be off to Paris for a year of research. I'm hoping it will be productive, and to keep you family/friends/random readers informed of my whereabouts and progress, I'm going to write a blog! I've done this before (see my other blogs: first from studying abroad in Paris in 2010, then from last summer in Paris/Urbino, and finally a little blog I made to write about Broadway musicals), but this one will be a little different.
While I do want to write about interesting experiences like I did in the other study abroad blogs, this time I actually want to focus on the studying. For that, I'm going to write about the books I'm reading, the scholars I meet, the OuLiPo meetings I go to, the transcriptions, the library visits, etc. While this may not sound interesting, I promise to make it as exciting as possible. In fact, I'll be participating in several fascinating projects, doing research on two different centuries, trying to bridge math and literature, and interacting with great scholars and authors. What's more, I'll be in a great cultural capital, where there are always museum exhibitions, concerts, operas, ballets, plays, and other things to do that, while perhaps not immediately applicable to my work, will no doubt enrich my work as well as my time abroad.
So, I think the main topic points for the blog will be as follows:
1) Life in Paris—this begins now, as I try to decide between staying in the free room that the ENS will provide me despite its obvious flaws (disgusting, co-ed bathrooms) and getting an expensive apartment or finding a roommate to share an apartment.
2) Academic life at the ENS—whether or not I choose to live there, I will be a pensionnaire étrangère, which is a fancy way of saying I will be affiliated with this Grande école. I'll not only have a student card, but I will probably attend a seminar or two, participate in their student groups (I believe they have an orchestra), their parties, their strange bar (k-fêt...I believe there is a blog post about it in my first blog), etc.
3) Library culture—this includes writing about books I'm currently reading (I think I'll write them like book reviews, so that anyone who is interested could read them as well and tell me what they think—in fact, please feel free to do that and comment!), some aspects of my dissertation, and also of course the library experience (which is quite different in France).
4) Conferences and Talks—I will be going to OuLiPo jeudis (monthly meetings) of course, but also hopefully presenting at conferences (so far, I know of one in Puerto Rico that I will be attending in October!), and also attending talks. The intellectual life at Princeton is incredible, but hopefully in Paris I will be hearing new ideas, new methodologies, and a different style of academics. Some talks in Paris when I studied abroad literally changed my life (George Steiner and the Oulipo jeudis, specifically).
5) Trips—I'm hoping to travel when I'm there. First, I'm going to Berlin, which will be a new linguistic experience (my German is nowhere near as good as my French or Italian). And from there, I can see a new part of Europe I don't know very well (Berlin is the only German city I've ever seen, and I've never been east of there).
And, that's the plan! I'm sure it will be an exciting year, and hopefully I'll be able to write this as often as I'd like!
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