Research directions
Workshop didactics
Emotions and learning, creativity
Performance studies
Spoken word and didactics
Poetics of slam
Slam poetry is an emerging literary movement, which originated from the nineteen eighties in Chicago (USA). Due to the success of Grand Corps Malade and audiovisual media coverage the slam movement is developing very quickly in France. However, neither the word "slam" itself nor the kind of poetry called "slam poetry" has been a subject of scientific research yet. The first purpose of this research is to explore these terms ("slam" and "slam poetry"), to show the relationship of slam literature to traditional literary forms like bards and rhapsody or musical genres like rap, and how the slam movement can be considered modern both in lexical terms and in terms of renewing the relations between the poet and his or her audience which is supposed to be the widest possible. The question whether the slam movement can be considered "neopoetic" will thus be discussed in this paper. This thesis demonstrates that the slam movement actually redefines the writer's position: slammers perform their own texts. As a physical and sensual experience, slam is live poetry which can be highly interactive, immediate and theatrical: it aims at involving everybody in a "colludic" way, essentially by means of word games. According to Marc Smith (the founder of the 'slamming' concept), slam is to be "integrative". Slamming opens the door to anyone (whereas "slam" main meaning is "to shut the door with a loud noise"), any kind or form of poetry; it can include any word, even slang or neologisms. A blend of verses and performance, fusion of genres, it can be seen as a laboratory for identity, expression and lexical creativity. In this research, is demonstrated the fact that slam encourages lexical creativity: in the performance texts and also in slam related contexts (flyers or slammers' pseudonyms for instance), various neologisms playing on different lexicogenic matrixes have been found. This research identifies these processes and the related functions, linking linguistic analysis to stylistic effects. The "neostyle" concept is a key to
Neology
