Jacques Roubaud. Poetry and Mathematics. 2007. 1/8

http://www.egs.edu/ Jacques Roubaud, French poet, mathematician, and composer of mathematics and poetry, in a video lecture with Judith Balso presenting, reading and discussion about mathematics, politics, truth, society, philosophy and poetry. Open video lecture and seminar for the students and faculty at the European Graduate School, EGS Media and Communication Program Studies Department, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, 2007.

Jacques Roubaud, born in 1932 in the town of Caluire, in the Provence region of southern France, is a Mathematics teacher at University of Paris X and a member of the Oulipo group. Jacques Roubaud, a self described manufacturer of mathematics and poetry, he has also published poetry, prose, plays, novels, and translated English, modern American as well as traditional Japanese poetry and books into French such as Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark.

Roubaud's fiction often suppresses the rigorous constraints of the Oulipo (while mentioning their suppression, thereby indicating that such constraints are indeed present), yet takes the Oulipian self-consciousness of the writing act to an extreme. This simultaneity both appears playfully, with his Hortense novels, Our Beautiful Heroine, Hortense in Exile, and Hortense is Abducted, and with the gravity and reflection of the writing act as the affirmation of one's worth and existence in The Great Fire of London, considered the pinnacle of his prose.

Other publications of Jacques Roubaud include Poésie, etcetera: ménage (1995), in which he makes a clean sweep of popular prejudices about contemporary poetry.

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