Poésie hors de la littérature – Paul Nougé : La publicité transfigurée

Abstract

This paper intends to consider a poetic experimentation of Paul Nougé, Belgian surrealist poet in the first half of the 20th century. A later experimentation, entitled La publicité transfigurée, aimed to directly expose poetic texts in public spaces, avoiding institutional mediation. Thus, we can analyse hermeneutic and aesthetic consequences of the absence of institutional frameworks behind literary products. Our study inquires into this phenomenon by means of the concepts of poetic function and Foucaldian heterotopy, comparing literature in general with the Publicité transfigurée. By later concepts, some alienating impacts of institutional mediation can be revealed in the respect of reading literary texts. It will therefore be possible to draw the conclusion that the absence of institutional mediation allows a more accentuated poetic function than in case of usually published literature and permits a particularly direct and intense reading of the writings of Nougé.