The Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature) is a literary think tank that brings together writers and mathematicians. Since 1960, its worldwide influence has refreshed ways of making and thinking about literature. How to Do Things with Forms assesses the work of the group, explores where it came from, and envisages its future. Redefining the Oulipo’s key concept of the constraint in a clear and rigorous way, Chris Andrews weighs the roles of craft and imitation in the group’s practice. He highlights the importance of translation for the Oulipo’s writers, explaining how their new forms convey meanings and how these famously playful authors are also moved by serious concerns. Offering fresh interpretations of emblematic Oulipian works such as Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, Andrews also examines lesser-known texts by Jacques Roubaud, Anne F. Garréta, and Michelle Grangaud. How to Do Things with Forms addresses questions of interest to anyone involved in the making of literature, illuminating how writers decide when to stop revising, the risks and benefits of a project mentality in creative writing, and ways of holding a reader’s interest for as long as possible.

Shifting the focus from human interiority toward the agency of cultural objects, social arrangements and aesthetic matter, How to Do Things with Affects examines the affective operations and transmissions triggered by various aesthetic forms, media events and cultural practices.

A college student writes: “These words I write/ open their mouths wide/ screaming the most intimate secrets.” An inmate in a maximum-security men’s prison writes: “Within my writing, I am able to break down my prison walls and escape, leave the gangster façade behind.” The Forms of Things Unknown: Teaching Poetry Writing to Teens and Adults draws from Shelley Savren’s forty years of teaching poetry writing to a diverse array of students, from teens with mental health issues to seniors to adults with developmental disabilities, and in a wide variety of settings, which include middle schools, high schools, colleges, juvenile halls, women’s centers, and a men’s prison. Each chapter includes an original poem from Savren, heartfelt stories, and lesson plans that introduce poetic concepts through model poems by professionals, open-ended writing assignments, methods for sharing and critiquing, and student poems. Designed for use in a classroom or community setting, this book features forty-one lesson plans and nineteen more poetry-writing workshop ideas and provides guidance and inspiration for teaching poetry writing to teens and adults.

"In Racial Things, Racial Forms, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon focuses on a coterie of underexamined contemporary Asian American poets — Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and John Yau — who reject many of the characteristics of traditional minority writing. In the poets’ various treatments of things (that is, objects of art), one witnesses a confluence of the avant-garde interest in objecthood and the racial question of objectification."-- Back cover.

Vols. 2 and 5 include appendices.

Humans pose an unprecedented threat to life in all its great diversity of forms. The human-induced extinction rate has been compared to “mass extinctions” of the past. But this language masks the fact that the crisis is due to voluntary, and thus, avoidable choices and actions. “Speaking of Forms of Life” shows that at the root of this crisis is the tragic inadequacy of the language predominantly used to represent and address what we are doing, including the language of “sustainable development,” “rights” for animals and the rest of nature, their “intrinsic value,” and conservation of species as “populations.” This talk alienates us from the other living things, from what they actually are, have and do, and it perpetuates the harm and loss. Campagna and Guevara compellingly argue, on rigorous but accessible grounds, that there is an alternative language to guide conservation, in confronting the radically urgent, ethical issues it faces. This is a language with which we are all familiar, mastered by naturalists, from Aristotle to Audubon. It articulates the primary value in life and the standard that must guide how human beings should live, as one form of life, among countless others. This book is a homecoming for those who practice conservation to, above all else, secure a creature’s ability to satisfy the necessities of its form of life.

Some of the most important principles of modern society were founded hundreds, even thousands, of years ago. Readers explore the lives of some of the greatest philosophers and thinkers of all time, from Socrates to Sartre. Topics covered include, how they lived, what their principles were, and what kind of an impact they have on modern society.