Daniel Levin Becker | |
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| Born | 1984 (age 39–40) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Yale University |
| Genre | writer, translator |
Daniel Levin Becker [upper-alpha 1] (born 1984 in Chicago) is an American writer, translator and musical critic.
In 2006, he finished his undergraduate studies in English and French at Yale University, where he also wrote for campus humor magazine Yale Record . [2] [3] In 2009 he was elected member of the French literary workshop Oulipo, making him the second American member of this group (the first is Harry Mathews). He was elected after a Fulbright year spent organizing and indexing that group's archives. He is the author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, published in April 2012 by Harvard University Press. [1]
Levin Becker [1] is currently the reviews editor for the magazine The Believer . [4]
He also contributes regularly as a music critic for the newspaper SF Weekly . [5] His writings and musical reviews can also be regularly found in Dusted Magazine, [6] The Point, [7] and The American Book Review , [8]
He is among a list of contributors to The &NOW Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing.[ citation needed ]
He has translated from the French texts including Georges Perec's dream journal La Boutique Obscure and Hervé Le Tellier's short story "A Few Musketeers," as well as Georges Perec, Oulibiographer by Bernard Magné [9] and Letter from the Author to his Editor by Marcel Bénabou. [10]
Levin Becker became an Oulipian when he was only 24, the youngest member at the time. He was also the youngest member and songwriter for the project band Mujeres Encinta that he joined when he was only a teenager. [11]
Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holocaust. Many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play.
A lipogram is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided. Extended Ancient Greek texts avoiding the letter sigma are the earliest examples of lipograms.
Oulipo is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior and Jean Lescure, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.
A Void, translated from the original French La Disparition, is a 300-page French lipogrammatic novel, written in 1969 by Georges Perec, entirely without using the letter e, following Oulipo constraints. Perec would go on to write with the inverse constraint in Les Revenentes, with only the vowel “e” present in the work. Ian Monk would later translate Les Revenentes into English under the title The Exeter Text.
Harry Mathews was an American writer, the author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays. Mathews was also a translator of the French language.
The Yale Record is the campus humor magazine of Yale University. Founded in 1872, it is the oldest humor magazine in the United States.
Fred McGraw Donner is a scholar of Islam and Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago. He has published several books about early Islamic history.
Ian Monk is a British writer and translator, based somewhere in France.
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ × 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notably, the Artforum logo is a bold and condensed iteration of the Akzidenz-Grotesk font, a feat for an American publication to have considering how challenging it was to obtain fonts favored by the Swiss school via local European foundries in the 1960s. Artforum is published by Artforum Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Media Corporation.
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
Ronald Jones was an American artist, critic and educator who gained prominence in New York City during the mid-1980s. In the magazine Contemporary, Brandon Labelle wrote: "Working as an artist, writer, curator, professor, lecturer and critic over the last 20 years, Jones is a self-styled Conceptualist, spanning the worlds of academia and art, opera and garden design, and acting as paternal spearhead of contemporary critical practice. Explorative and provocative, Jones creates work that demands attention that is both perceptual and political." Labelle positions Jones along the leading edge of a "contemporary critical practice" that is perhaps best described as interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary.
Richard Allen Posner is an American legal scholar who served as a federal appellate judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1981 to 2017. A senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Posner was identified by The Journal of Legal Studies as the most-cited legal scholar of the 20th century. As of 2021, he is also the most-cited legal scholar of all time. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential legal scholars in the United States.
Michael Robert Auslin is an American writer, policy analyst, historian, and scholar of Asia. He is currently the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a Senior Fellow in the Asia and National Security Programs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and a senior fellow at London's Policy Exchange. He was formerly an associate professor at Yale University and a resident scholar and director of Japanese studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
Clovis Heimsath, FAIA was an American architect with significant contributions to both architectural scholarship and modern architecture, particularly in Texas. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut and educated at Yale, where he was an editorial associate of campus humor magazine The Yale Record. Heimsath died on October 10, 2021, at the age of 90.
Leland de la Durantaye is a writer, critic, translator and professor of comparative literature. He has taught at the École normale supérieure and Harvard University and is currently Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College.
Marcel Bénabou is a French writer and historian.
La Bibliothèque oulipienne is a collection that hosts the works of the individual and collective members of the Oulipo. The short texts that compose them form a fabric of playful literary creations.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is an American geographer and writer. Among his books are Island People: The Caribbean and the World (2016), Names of New York (2021) and, with the writer Rebecca Solnit, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (2016). Jelly-Schapiro is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Believer, Artforum, Transition, and The Nation.
Combinatory literature is a type of fiction writing in which the author relies and draws on concepts outside of general writing practices and applies them to the creative process. This method of writing challenges conventional structuralist processes and approaches. To do this, the author investigates alternate disciplines outside the common channels of creative writing and literature, notably mathematics, science and other humanities. The author then applies constraints or influences from the new concepts to their writing process. This inspires creativity in literature regarding form, structure, language and narrative plot, among other things. The emergence of combinatory literature is largely the result of philosophers and intellectuals who have been concerned with the interrelated nature of disciplines and the way these combine to affect brain function. Notable proponents of combinatory literature include T. S. Eliot, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, whilst modern writers like George Saunders have credited having a multiple disciplinary background as influential on their work.
René Marill Albérès, or R. M. Albérès, was the pseudonym of René Marill, a French writer and literary critic. He published book-length studies of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, André Gide, Gérard de Nerval, Jean Giraudoux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Butor, Franz Kafka, as well as surveys of the novel in twentieth-century European literature.
Drawn to the Oulipo's mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris.
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