Perec, Georges

Bio Sketch

Georges Perec (1936–1982) was a French writer and member of the Oulipo group, celebrated for his experimental, constraint-based fiction and his meticulous investigations of the everyday. His L'Infra-ordinaire and Les Lieux (Places) seek to recover the "infra-ordinary" — the banal, quotidian, background noise of existence that habit renders invisible. He matters to Geoffrey's research as the exemplary practitioner of a fragmentary, inventory-based description of the everyday.

Key Works

• L'Infra-ordinaire (1989) — the "infra-ordinary": the banal, the quotidian, the background noise; "making inventories" (faire les inventaires).
• Les Lieux (Places, 1969) — a long-term project describing twelve Paris locations, alternating neutral on-site description with memory-based "memory places" (lieux souvenirs).
• Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1974) — "What is there under your wallpaper?"

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Everyday Life — the everyday as the "infra-ordinary," recovered through inventory and description.
• Appropriation — Perec's Species of Spaces and Life: A User's Manual as the literary enactment of inhabitation as appropriation via the gameboard.

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Perec is the model for the descriptive recovery of the everyday that Clucas's "negative phenomenology" proposes: "making inventories" of the banal without reducing it to a system. His "What is there under your wallpaper?" is quoted by Seigworth & Gardiner as an epigraph to their rethinking of everyday life. He gives Geoffrey a concrete, literary-practical method for the everyday that complements the theoretical accounts of Lefebvre, de Certeau, and Felski.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki that draw on Perec:

• Cultural Phenomenology and the Everyday (Clucas 2000) — the "infra-ordinary," inventories, Les Lieux.
• Rethinking Everyday Life (Seigworth & Gardiner 2004) — "What is there under your wallpaper?"
• Habit and Inhabit, Stuff and Trash (Spuybroek 2025) — Spuybroek's reading of Species of Spaces and Life: A User's Manual: the gameboard as the space of the possible; the Knight's Tour; the gap between interiors (plural) and the interior (singular) as the space of appropriation.
• Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday (Yoka & Paschalidis eds. 2015) — Perec's "dense thing-worlds" cited in the Introduction as one pole of literary modernism's distinctive concern with the everyday (with Alain Robbe-Grillet).