Philippe Soupault

"Lost Profiles is a remembrance of things past by poet and co-founder of the surrealist movement, Philippe Soupault. Beginning with a memoir of his involvement with Dada and his own role in transforming it into surrealism, Soupault takes us on a tour of post-WWI Paris, encountering the likes of Proust, Apollinaire, and Joyce during a seminal period of European culture"--

Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields) is a book by André Breton and Philippe Soupault. It is famed as the first work of literary Surrealism. Published in 1920, the authors used a surrealist automatic writing technique. The book is considered Surrealist, rather than Dadaist, because it attempts to create something new rather than react to an existing work. Les Champs magnetiques is characterised by rich textured language that often seems to border on the nonsensical. This is considered a "normal" result of automatic writing and is considerably more logical than the output from other Surrealist techniques, such as "exquisite corpse" (a method whereby each of a group of collaborators, in sequence, adds words or images to a composition). The division between chapters was the point where the writers stopped writing at the end of the day. The next chapter was started the following morning. Breton gave many interviews about the creation of the book.

C'est à la texture d'un discours poétique chez Philippe Soupault qu'est consacré ce livre. Seule la plongée dans la langue nous permet de faire émerger une autre façon de la lire. On s'en convaincra à suivre les poètes et critiques français et étrangers. Ils se sont attachés à la multiplicité des genres auxquels Philippe Soupault a donné voix et à la présence au monde et au temps d'un poète sensible à l'étrange et à l'étranger.