Oulipo
The Book of Eleanor
Introduction
Eleanor’s recumbent statue seems to be one of the first depictions in the West of a woman reading. The authors of the Oulipo were invited to answer this question: what is Eleanor of Aquitaine reading?
Such a suggestion was inevitably a stimulating one for the Oulipo. For this book of stone was also an invitation to consider the new potentialities of reading in a digital environment.
The Book of Eleanor is a series of texts selected and composed by the Oulipo, offering a familial and literary interpretation
of Eleanor’s book: one book, just one, among an infinite number of possibilities, but a book linked to this blank book by the evocation of nothingness and fullness.
You are about to open this book in its digital edition, in English or in French. This electronic book, that imitates the classical model of printed book, is one of the components of the multimedia installation, conceived with Elena García-Oliveros, where the visitors can become readers of this book in its varied material states.