Sur les pas des poètes ? Une comparaison de deux sentiers littéraires luxembourgeois

At the center of this communication are two literary hiking trails: the Sentier des poètes in the Fond-de-Gras in the mining south of Luxembourg, inaugurated in 2011 on the occasion of the international year of the forest, and the Ettelbrécker Literaturwee [The Literary Trail of the city of Ettelbruck] in the north, on the edge of the Ardennes, which is currently under construction and whose inauguration is scheduled for spring 2022.
The two paths are conceived as original creative projects and therefore do neither retrace a historical path nor the work or life of a particular writer. Their comparison offers interesting points of analysis as to the targeted objectives (target audiences, promotion of literature, creative writing project), to the participating authors (literary socialization, geographical link to the places), to the installations (panels displaying the texts and presenting the authors, geolocation, additional digital content), and to the texts themselves (literary genres, representations of nature, relationship to place and territory). My participation, in an action-research approach, in the organizing committee of the Ettelbécker Literaturwee allows me to describe the interdisciplinary scope of this project, bringing together approaches and interests of its various partners: regional library and tourist office, Centre national de littérature, university, or the association Natur&Ëmwelt which works for the protection of the environment.
More broadly, my research and observations – within the framework of cultural ecology which studies the material and symbolic scope of literary texts in their “ecocultural ” context – relate on the one hand to the writing and reception of texts in situ, which paradoxically de-naturalizes our reading habits. On the other hand, I question the importance of territorial anchoring of texts in the context of Luxembourg: What does 21st century writing of place mean in a small literary field which has struggled to dissociate itself from regional and/or rural literature?