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NaLTT
The Observatoire des Littératures Sauvages was founded at the University of Namur thanks to an FNRS Scientific Initiative Grant awarded in December 2020 to Denis Saint-Amand.
The OLSa is dedicated to exploring how literature takes shape beyond the page—through objects and alternative channels—which sometimes nourish and invigorate the literary world, but can just as easily develop at a considerable distance from it.
An open network
The OLSa brings together researchers—both men and women—who are interested in cultural and literary works that can be described as “primitive.”
In *The Archaeology of Knowledge*, Michel Foucault noted that one of the central aims of the history of ideas was to “tell the story of the peripheries and margins” — and to clarify that this is a “history not of literature but of that peripheral murmur, of that everyday writing so quickly erased that it never attains the status of a work of art, or is immediately stripped of it.”
There are many non-book-based works that draw on the resources of literary communication: handwritten albums, guest books, flyers, banners, graffiti, handmade documents crafted by the Surrealists and Situationists, mimeographed newspapers, fanzines, or, of course, the screen—among many other examples—are media that accommodate hybrid works leaving room for lyricism, fiction, or formal experimentation.
The Observatoire des Littératures Sauvages is dedicated to these works; its members, drawing from diverse disciplines, are committed to studying the connections between these literary practices and the social world.
OLSa's Construction Projects
Drawing on approaches and tools from poetics, history, sociology, anthropology, semiotics, linguistics, and pragmatics, the OLSa’s research projects focus on:
- the material specificity of the media used and its effects on the poetics of the text,
- the poetics of “wild” writings
- the evolution of these writings and their potential appropriation
