ABSTRACT
Georges Perec was an experimentalist, a writer intrigued by the possibilities of literary form. Although he is best known for his novels, he also wrote plays, poetry, essays, film scripts, opera librettos, and many other texts that elude traditional generic categories. In a 1978 interview, Perec spoke of his goals: "My ambition as a writer would be to traverse all of contemporary literature, without ever feeling that I am retracing my own steps or returning to beaten ground, and to write everything that someone today can possibly write." Elsewhere, he suggested that four major concerns animated his work: an interest in the apparently trivial details of ordinary life, a tendency toward confession and autobiography, an impulse toward formal innovation, and a desire to tell engaging, absorbing stories.
