Groupe μ

This interdisciplinary group works out of the Center of Poetic Studies at the University of Liège, in Belgium, and was formed in 1967.

Beyond their personal research in biochemistry, cultural sociology, aesthetics, or semiotics, the authors have published collectively various books as well as more than sixty papers in such journals as Communications, Poétique, Versus, Visio, Degrés, Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme, Communication et langage, Era, Revue d'esthétique, Le Français moderne, Texte, Technê, Protée, RS/SI, Nouveaux actes sémiotiques, Les Documents de travail d'Urbino, etc.

[citation needed] Some of their early work in the 1960s dealt with linguistically oriented topics such as polysemous language, and the nature of synecdoche and metaphor.

The group separated itself even further from formal structuralism with the publication of A Rhetoric of Poetry (1977), which showed that, although the presence of certain linguistic structures – and foremost amongst them poly-isotopy, made possible by rhetorical figures – was a necessary condition for the production of poetic effects, this condition was not enough, and that anthropological and social criteria would be needed to complete these structures.

The Traité du signe visuel (1992) (which Göran Sonesson said was to visual communication what Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale was to linguistics) sought to elaborate a general grammar of the image, independently of the type of corpus being considered.