Book Review: The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise. (Author: Georges Perec. Translated by David Bellos. London: Verso, 2011)

Abstract

The author Georges Perec is best known as a leader of the oulipo movement of French experimental writers. In the early part of the twentieth century, a dominant force in French literature was surrealism, which maintained an aesthetic ideology of freedom that was perhaps best represented by the technique of automatic writing. In such writing an author put down on paper whatever words came into his or her mind in order to supposedly unleash a Freudian id unconstrained by faculties of conscious sense-making. Although the oulipoian writers often have created texts which seem similar to those of the surrealists in their lack of conventional order and sense, their procedure has been to impose constraints rather than disregard them. Influenced by the elaborate procedures used by Raymond Roussel, also a major influence on the surrealists, they forced their writing to follow strict and often arbitrary rules which prevented or limited free expression.