Portrait of the artist as a mathematician

Marie, Caroline; Reggiani, Christelle

doi:https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.7.3.101

Journal of Romance Studies (2007), 7, (3), 101–110.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.7.3.101
Language: English
Pages: 10

Abstract

This article presents a typology of the aesthetic functions of mathematics as structural device and literary motif and discusses various ways the mathematical can be integrated into the literary, showing that a genuine mathematization of literature is illusory and that mathematics, when transposed into a literary text, is necessarily always poetical. It compares works by French Oulipo writers and works by non-oulipian English or American authors in order to determine how literature articulates numbers and letters and whether mathematics functions differently when integrated into a literary text as constraints or as patterns.

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