Marc Lapprand élu membre de la Société Royale du Canada
Lapprand. Credit: Photo Services
Marc Lapprand, a French literature modernist who specializes in the life and work of cult figure Boris Vian, is a knight of culture and literature himself. In 2018, Lapprand was made a chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes académiques, an ancient league of academics and teachers. He earned this title, one of France’s highest honours for culture and education, after three decades of research on Vian, a French polymath and inventor born in 1920 whom Lapprand describes as “a blend of Lewis Carroll, Richard Brautigan and James Joyce, if compared to English-speaking writers.”
Vian died young, in 1959. One year later, Oulipo was founded. It is a loosely organized group whose followers liberate literature by tightening the rules and it has been Lapprand’s other scholarly passion, besides teaching, for some 30 years. In 2020, he published a second monograph on the group. He also developed an interest in evolutionary psychology and applying Darwinism to storytelling, with a dossier on the subject published in @nalyses: Revue de critique et de théorie littéraire after a symposium at the 2013 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, held at UVic.
A former chair of UVic’s French department, Lapprand believes in “building bridges” within the Francophone communities and schools, as well as reaching other French-speaking communities—"from near locations to remote places worldwide: a genuine representation of the diversity of the department’s faculty.”
Because the research and experiments of Oulipo [an innovative group of writers and mathematicians] blend mathematical algorithms and literature, there is a rigour behind the text. It’s very liberating. It sounds like a paradox. But it’s not. And there’s a lot of humour. Whenever you play on words and language, humour is never far away.
—Marc Lapprand, Royal Society of Canada member