Prizes have become indispensable to contemporary literary culture and have developed into one of its most high-profiled phenomena. This article examines the intersections between literary awards and gender, whilst drawing on fieldtheoretical approaches to literature. It successively discusses awarding behaviour, jury composition, and jury reports of a large number of Dutch literary prizes from the post-war era to the present. It argues, that the award scene has been governed by a conservative judging habitus, which seems to be inspired by the literary dispositions, inclinations and preferences of (white) middle-aged men who have predominantly populated juries for many decades; yet a drastic change in jury composition and awarding behaviour has swept through the award scene in recent years, resulting in a steep rise of female laureates. Additionally, it examines the ways in which juries have written in their reports about gender in connection to literary quality over the course of years.
Commonly known as one of the last Flemish authors who resorted to French as a literary language, Suzanne Lilar (1901-1992) constitutes a curious case in Belgian literary history. Raised in a petit bourgeois Ghent-based family, she compiled a complex oeuvre consisting of plays, novels and essays. In an attempt to anchor her oeuvre in the literary tradition, Lilar turned to the writings of the Middle Dutch mystic Hadewijch (ca. 1240), remodelling the latter’s memory to her own ends. This article argues that Lilar’s remembrance of Hadewijch took shape against the broader canvas of transfer activities undertaken by other prominent cultural mediators of Hadewijch’s oeuvre. Drawing on insights from memory studies and cultural transfer studies, an analysis of Lilar’s mobilisation of Hadewijch in two of Lilar’s most important works, Le Couple (1963) and Une enfance gantoise (1976), will show that Lilar’s rewriting of the mystic into her own oeuvre is marked by an intricate layering of mnemonic spheres: the author’s personal memory-scape, the cultural memory of Flanders and of Belgium, and a universal ‘mystical’ memory which she considered to be lodged within every human soul. In teasing out the relations between these spheres, this article will demonstrate that Lilar aimed to further the memory of Hadewijch as an icon of (Neo)platonic nostalgia and as a marker of Flemish and Belgian cultural hybridity.
Drawing on the concepts of ‘superdiversity’ and ‘thirdspace’ this article analyses the work of Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer as a description of a specific Italian city, i.e. Genoa. The main claim is that this in literature evoked city has its unique history and social stratification but is representative as well for the current European space. Literary fiction in its ambiguity and polyphony confronts us with real circumstances, therefore fiction provides social knowledge and can be relevantly used in urban studies.
In this article we argue for a study of Dutch literature that adjusts the ‘what’ (research domain) and ‘how’ (research method) to the time in which we currently find ourselves. We refer to the conditions of our era as late modern conditions (Giddens), which means that they can be traced back to earlier, modern conditions; we can therefore examine the historical and cultural background and causes. The fact that these are conditions means that if we take these conditions seriously they are changing the nature and design of our field. We argue that the study of Dutch literature can help us to trace the concrete affective, emotional and imaginary patterns and routines that both characterize and uphold late modernity. Our argument will take shape through a reading of two contemporary novels: Maxim Februari’s Klont (2017) and Lieke Marsman’s Het tegenovergestelde van een mens (2017).
During the Nazi regime and, more specifically, the Second World War, literary translation was eyed with suspicion by the controlling instances as it inevitably involved the import of foreign thought as well as economic exchange with foreign states. Against this backdrop, Flanders represents an interesting case. On the one hand, since it was considered a ‘kindred’ source-language nation, the translation of Flemish literature into German was encouraged within the constraints of the totalitarian system. On the other hand, persisting literary traditions, the private market logic, the agency of mediators, and the prevailing Catholic tone and idyllic nature of much Flemish literature caused significant disparities between translation policy and practice. Starting from the publishing figures of translated Flemish literature in Nazi Germany and their evolution during the twelve-year period, this article confronts official attitudes and discourses regarding Flemish translated fiction with the actual situation within the translated fiction market.
Terrorism and literary modernism have an uncanny liaison. How should we understand and judge this eerie relationship? This article examines the case of the novelist and polemicist Willem Frederik Hermans from a psychoanalytical perspective. It argues that it is too naive to say that literary writers do not commit terrorism, simply because their acts of violence involve words only. Terrorists are not just those who threaten to inflict physical violence on others to acquire attention for their ideological cause. This does not mean, however, that we should not try to differentiate philosophically between the terrorism of terrorists and the terrorism of literary modernists. We can catch sight of a more tenable, structural difference between the two forms of terrorism if we take into account the psychoanalytical notions of the symbolic and imaginary with respect to terrorism, as well as the related concepts of perversion and sublimation .
For scholarly reasons of reproducibility and verifiability, the reader can find here three English translations of texts written by Hermans that I used for the article ‘The Modernist Affair with Terrorism: The Curious Case of Willem Frederik Hermans’. The translations were made for scholarly usage within the NWO project ‘The Power of Autonomous Literature: Willem Frederik Hermans’ (2010-2015) and/or as course material within the curriculum of Modern Dutch Literature at Utrecht University. Although one of these texts (‘Preamble’) is a fictional text with a dramatized author and one of them is a very short column originally published in a newspaper (‘Behind the Signposts’), I consider them all very important poetical essays on the greater purpose of Hermans’s literature. 'Preamble' (pp. 38-42) is the translation by Ina Rilke of ‘Preambule’, the introduction of the short story collection Paranoia, first published in Dutch in 1953. It was recently republished as part of the seventh volume of Volledige Werken. 'Behind the Signposts No Admittance' (pp. 43-44) is the translation by Sven Vitse of ‘Achter borden Verboden Toegang’, first published in Het Vrije Volk, 25 January 1956. It was republished in Het sadistische universum (1964), now part of the eleventh volume of Volledige Werken. 'Unsympathetic Fictional Characters' (pp. 45-55) is the translation by Michele Hutchison of ‘Antipathieke romanpersonages’, originally published first in De Vlaamse Gids 44 (1960) and republished in the fifth and extended edition of Het sadistische universum (1967), also part of the eleventh volume of Volledige Werken.
Drawing on the concepts of ‘superdiversity’ and ‘thirdspace’ this article analyses the work of Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer as a description of a specific Italian city, i.e. Genoa. The main claim is that this in literature evoked city has its unique history and social stratification but is representative as well for the current European space. Literary fiction in its ambiguity and polyphony confronts us with real circumstances, therefore fiction provides social knowledge and can be relevantly used in urban studies.
This article investigates the reception of Belgian French-speaking author Marie Gevers in Nazi Germany. Limited as her success may have been, the fact that her works were translated into German could come as a surprise, as their depiction of Gevers’s native Flanders did not fully conform to the Nazi regime’s literary and ideological expectations. The present paper looks into the processes through which Gevers managed to be introduced into the German literary market of the time and to be accepted – or rather tolerated – by the Nazi propaganda system.
During the Nazi occupation of Belgium, an effort was launched by Frans Haepers and the editorial staff of the weekly journal Volk en Kultuur to invent a Flemish tradition around the Dutch cultural icon William of Orange. The effort was based on two German-language historical novels, Wilhelm Kotzde-Kottenrodt’s Wilhelmus and Rudolf Kremser’s Der stille Sieger, which were subsequently translated into Dutch. The article argues that the Flemish recourse to William of Orange as mediated through the novels and their translation was a way to negotiate the conflicting collaborationist politics of Groot-Nederland, favored by Flemish nationalists, and the Grosgermanisches Reich, favored by Flemish Nazis.
The contribution of future Belgo-American university professor Paul de Man (1919-1983) to the collaborationist press in occupied Belgium has not been studied from the perspective of cultural transfer research. This essay offers a comprehensive analytical approach to de Man’s work as an ‘intercultural mediator’ during World War II, considering his numerous articles on foreign literatures published in Le Soir and other French- and Dutch-language Belgian newspapers under German occupation as well as his translations from German and Dutch/Flemish into French. The study will necessarily take the systemic context of intellectual collaboration into consideration, especially as far as the networks of editorial life and of transnational Franco-German cultural relationships during the Nazi regime are concerned.
Herman Gorter (1864-1927) became famous as the author of May (1889) and Poems (1890). His opus magnum Pan , published in 1916, hardly acquired any readership at all, which is remarkable, given the monumental size and scope of this unique achievement, celebrating the imminent proletarian revolution and the advent of the communist era: a visionary work of global proportions. Gorter’s Pan will be assessed as thinking poetry, more precisely: as dialectical materialist poetry, as a work of art which articulates a dialectical materialist worldview, not only concerning political economy and society, but also concerning nature and the universe as such, from the stars and galaxies of modern astrophysics down to the atoms and molecules of modern chemistry and quantum physics. Gorter’s monumental work is ‘thinking poetry’ in the Heideggerian sense of the term, sensitive to an imminent upheaval of Being as such, as well as a dialectical materialist artwork (albeit with a tinge of Spinozism) contributing (via the ‘school of poetry’) to a dialectical understanding of space, time, life and matter. In this article, I will focus on two crucial recurring motives: the motif of the shining crystal and the motif of the beaming galaxy. Via these motifs, so I suggest, Gorter aspires to bridge the gap between his epic-lyrical poetry and twentieth-century science.
Naturalism is one of the best-studied literary movements in (Dutch) literary history. Ton Anbeek formulated in 1982 eight characteristics of Dutch naturalist fiction. Working within the digital library environment Nederlab, we test these characteristics by applying LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to a corpus of naturalist fiction and a reference corpus of other fiction from the same period. We confirm some of Anbeek’s claims (naturalist novels are about nervous characters experiencing a process of disenchantment), fail to confirm some (we find no evidence for the role of determinism), and cannot test some others (e.g. the naturalist author despises bourgeois society). We do find some new ‘negative’ characteristics of Dutch Naturalism: subjects that occur significantly less in naturalist than in non-naturalist texts. Among these are words related to work, achievement and money. These findings intuitively fit with our idea of a naturalist character but require further study.
Among the seven popular narratives with a widespread European printed tradition until 1600 (Septem sapientum, Quatre fils Aymon, Melusine, Floire et Blanchefleur, Apollonius and Paris et Vienne), Griseldis is the one which was printed mostly. The story of the patient and constant Griseldis was first told by Giovanni Boccaccio as the last of his one hundred stories in Il Decamerone (1349–53) and translated into vernaculars all over Europe. The paper presents a detailed survey of the printed Griseldis tradition in four languages and shows that in the Dutch and English language areas from the beginning of printing until 1600, in Dutch the editions of Griseldis were published anonymously by the printer publishers who regarded themselves as transmitters of a famous and fixed story. The English tradition, however, is characterized by numerous versions written by different (famous) authors who obviously felt the need and saw the chances to adapt the story to different genres and to rewrite it according to their own desires and purposes.
The development of the early modern novel in the Netherlands and the German Empire traversed a similar course. Mindful of the ties between German and Dutch writers ca. 1620-1660, scholars have postulated a close relationship between Johan van Heemskerck’s Inleydinghe tot het ontwerp van een Batavische Arcadia (1637) and Philipp von Zesen’s Die adriatische Rosemund (1645). The essay demonstrates the complexity of this relationship through an analysis of their translations and critical reception of French Renaissance novels, and the role of history in shaping the composition of their original works. Van Heemskerck and Zesen each challenged and emended the tradition of French romance from which their own works derived by setting forth a patriotic program to educate readers about their respective nations. Through the subordination of romance to history, van Heemskerck and Zesen elucidated the responsibilities of Dutch and German readers to preserve the state through the cultivation of virtue and self-discipline.
It is commonly maintained that Belgium held less appeal for intellectuals in exile between the two wars than the Netherlands or France. This phenomenon has not been studied in Belgium extensively enough to fully verify or explain it. We do know, however, that a relatively smaller number of Jews were deported from Belgium during the occupation than from the Netherlands or France. Would it be fair to hypothesize, then, that Jewish intellectuals were safer there, or in any event had a better chance of surviving, than in neighbouring countries? Could more survival strategies be deployed in Belgium than elsewhere? My focus in this paper is on Hans Handovsky (1888-1959), a German chemist of Austrian Jewish origin, who emigrated to Ghent in 1934 and returned to Heidelberg in 1957. By examining his letters to the two Flemish writers August Vermeylen and Fernand Toussaint van Boelaere, we can shed light on how he managed to survive the German occupation. We show how the assistance of non-Jewish intellectuals could contribute to saving a Jewish intellectual.
This volume deals with the field of Belgian-German cultural relations during the Nazi occupation of Belgium (1940-1944) from the perspective of the cultural transfer paradigm. Considering the highly political charged context of a totalitarian regime, which is, in this case, simultaneously occupying and waging war with its cultural ‘partners”, we are obviously dealing with large asymmetries of power and a censorship system that ‘blocks, manipulates and controls [...] cross-cultural communication’. 1 We can therefore assume that the terms of the cultural ‘dialogue’ were unilaterally determined by the Nazi German censorial institutions for the purposes of both promoting their ideological world views and realizing the foreign policy goals of the regime. The approach of cultural transfer research allows us to differentiate this assumption without relativizing the overtly repressive and destructive nature of Nazi dictatorship. With its focus on individual agency and interactions, it enables us to further analyse the intricacy of the politically dominated cultural exchange. More specifically, it helps to reveal the – often competing – factors that shaped the transfer and transformation of cultural products, while also displaying the marked tension between the highly repressive totalitarian system and the actual agency of cultural agents.
Because the 400th anniversary of the birth of William of Orange coincided with the beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933, a small surge of publications raised awareness in Germany of the history of the Dutch rebellion against Spain. For two decades, German writers across the ideological spectrum appropriated motifs from the life of William of Orange in order to represent and reflect on German-Netherlandic relations during the Nazi era. This article focuses in particular on the deployment of ‘Das Niederlandische Gebet’ and the bridge motif, with an emphasis on works by Fritz von Unruh.
The following articles are based on a two-day seminar held at the annual conference of the German Studies Association that took place from 29 September to 2 October 2016 in San Diego, California, and was organized by Carl Niekerk (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) and Simon Richter (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia). The seminar’s goal was to bring together a number of scholars active in the United States, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands who not only perform research in the fields of literary and cultural studies, but also combine an interest in both German and Netherlandic-Flemish studies. For many years, scholarship and public opinion have tended to focus on the ‘national’ when it comes to describing Europe’s cultural output and accounting for diversity since the late Medieval period. This is particularly the case for periods in which this national identity is perceived to be under threat, because of supranational political entities like the European Union or an alleged endangerment of one’s own cultural identity because of immigration from elsewhere. This ‘national’ paradigm has also long characterized the discourse on smaller nations like Belgium and the Netherlands. Our seminar was interested in the question whether in the case of both Flemish and Netherlandic culture such a ‘national’ approach is indeed the most appropriate and productive way, since we are dealing here with smaller geographic entities (that in the case of Flanders does not even possess its own national monolingual territory). This question is relevant in particular when we compare Flanders and the Netherlands with the Federal Republic of Germany (and its various predecessors), a much larger political entity, which has long struggled both with its own national identity and its political place in Europe. The idea underlying the following articles is that in the case of smaller cultural entities like the Netherlands and Flemish-speaking Belgium, a ‘national’ approach misses an essential aspect of these cultures: their higher level of receptiveness to impulses coming from surrounding cultural traditions. Precisely because of their assumed marginality, such smaller cultures have a meaningful function as meeting places and contact zones. In the case of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, we have three distinct but historically, geographically, and linguistically proximate cultures. Over the course of five centuries, discernible patterns of interaction, refraction, and projection have developed—a process that sometimes involved conflicts in a variety of forms while often taking the shape of more peaceful forms of borrowing, mutual appropriation, and collaboration (in its positive and negative meaning). There is a long and varied tradition of artistic, intellectual, and cultural interaction that is not necessarily limited to these three entities, precisely because of their respective ability to be open to impulses from the outside. The following articles offer case studies of these interactions and thus hope to contribute to new models for understanding their patterns.
