Georges Perec's literary legacy perhaps resonates most strongly for the current members of the Oulipo, or Workshop for Potential Literature (Ouvroir de litterature potentielle). Perec joined the group in 1967, seven years after its founding by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, during a moment of generational transition that had begun with the ‘co-opting’ of the poet Jacques Roubaud in 1966. Subsequently, Perec's legendary formal virtuosity and (in his own words) ‘systematic versatility’ have become at once an inspiration and an obstacle for members of the ‘third generation’ of Oulipians – those writers who joined the group after Perec's demise in 1982. In the collective Oulipo volume Moments oulipiens, both Jacques Jouet and Anne Garréta wryly cite the catchphrase ‘Georges thought of that already’ (Georges y avait pense), a refrain that inevitably greets the writing proposals of the group's eager new recruits. This version of what Harold Bloom called the ‘anxiety of influence’ reflects Perec's pivotal role in the Oulipo's history. That is, his exhaustive approach to the possibilities of literary constraints risked exhausting the group's experimental project while ultimately pushing its writers in new directions.

If the group has since moved out from under the shadow of mourning, Perec nevertheless continues to haunt Oulipian production. Death, we should recall, does not exclude Oulipo members from the group, but merely excuses them from attending the regular meetings. Perec's impact is visible not only, or perhaps not even primarily, on the level of constraints (the lipogram of A Void and its monovocalic counterpart The Exeter Text being the most spectacular examples in his body of work). It is also manifest in Perec's production of what Marcel Bénabou has called ‘epidemic’ creations, a set of endlessly generative works that continue to inspire imitations and rewritings. Thus Perec's Je me souviens (itself inspired by Joe Brainard's I Remember) is the model, or countermodel, for Jacques Jouet's Exercices de la memoire (Memory Exercises), Jacques Bens's J'ai oublie (I Forgot), and Garréta and Valérie Beaudouin's Tu te souviens …? (You Remember …?). His short story The Winter Journey, written in 1979, gave rise to a series of sequels that are now gathered in the collective volume Winter Journeys, a volume which, even as it problematises the idea of literary origins, inscribes a text by Perec as the source of an Oulipian mythology.