The Afterlives of Georges Perec
Edited by Rowan Wilken, Justin Clemens
- What do Perec's descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life reveal about our use of information and communications technologies?
- What happens if we read Life: A User’s Manual as a toolbox of ideas for games studies?
- What light does the concept of the ‘infra-ordinary’ shed on social media?
- What insights does algorithmic writing generate for the digital humanities?
- What lessons can architects, artists, game-designers and writers draw from Perec's fascination with creative constraints?
Through an examination of such questions, this collection takes Perec scholarship beyond its existing limits to offer new ways of rethinking our present.
ContributorsTom Apperley, Monash University, Australia.
Caroline Bassett, University of Sussex, UK.
David Bellos, Princeton, USA.
Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Ben Highmore, University of Sussex, UK.
Alison James, University of Chicago, USA.
Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, University of Sydney, Australia.
Christian Licoppe, Télécom ParisTech, France.
Anthony McCosker, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.
Mireille Ribière, independent scholar, translator and author.
Darren Tofts, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.
Rowan Wilken, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia.
Mark Wolff, Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, USA.
List of FiguresNotes on ContributorsAcknowledgments
Introduction1. Posthumous News: The Afterlives of Georges Perec, Justin Clemens & Rowan Wilken
Part 1: Art of the (Un)realizable2. Georges Perec’s Enduring Presence in the Visual Arts, Mireille Ribière3. Apoetic Life: Perec, Poetry, Pneumatology, Justin Clemens4. UnSearching for Rue Simon-Crubellier: Perec Out-of-Sync, Darren Tofts5. Invoking the Oracle: Perec, Algorithms, and Conceptual Writing, Mark Wolff
Part 2: The Poetics of the Quotidian and Urban Space6. Georges Perec and the Significance of the Insignificant, Ben Highmore7. What Perec Was Looking For: Notes on Automation, The Everyday, and Ethical Writing, Caroline Bassett8. ‘Things That Should Be Short': Perec, Sei Shōnagon, Twitter, and the Uses of Banality, Anthony McCosker & Rowan Wilken
Part 3: Ludic Intensities and Creative Constraints9. Perec and the Politics of Constraint, Alison James10. The Architecture of Constraint and Forgetting, Sandra Kaji-O’Grady11. Georges Perec: A Player’s Manual, Thomas Apperley
Part 4: Productive Problems of Description and Transcription12. ‘"An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris": Georges Perec, Observer-writer of Urban Life, as a Mobile Locative Media User’, Christian Licoppe13. The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog: Perec, Description, and the Scene of Everyday Computer Use, Rowan Wilken
Afterword14. The Afterlives of a Writer, David Bellos
Index
A literally fabulous introduction to Perec’s work, still relatively unknown in the Anglophone world – a treasure trove of clues as to where previously unknown riches are to be found in the multidimensional oeuvre which this Parisian polymath bequeathed us – full of unforeseen marvels and infra-ordinary wonders.
