Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 19, Issue 2, 2014

The interrelation of public and academic literary criticism often leads to controversy within the literary field, especially when writers obtain an academic position. As Jo Tollebeek showed in Mannen van karakter (2011) and Nico Laan in Het belang van smaak (1996), the competition between the academic and public discourse on literature is inherent to the history of literary studies. What are the criteria for distinguishing public and academic criticism?

This question is examined for the period 1925-1935 by taking the professorship of the poet and critic Albert Verwey (1865-1937) as a case study. Verwey legitimated his academic position by referring to Shelley and the concept of ‘imagination’ as a special source of knowledge. By doing so he presented an artistic and philosophical argument for appointing a poet as a professor of literature. Additionally, ten years later, Verwey revealed that he accepted the position in order to change the way literature was represented by traditional historiography. How did the activities of the poet, critic and academic relate to each other? How did Verwey position himself within, or in between, the academic and the public discourse on literature? And why does Verweys positioning problematize the relation between academic and non-academic literary criticism?

Rejecting internal analyses of the end of literature like the one by William Marx, the article argues that in order to assess the current position of literature an external scope is paramount. The book market seems to be the proper context to analyze the phenomenon literature. On the basis of recent research on literary institutions and using the latest data concerning trends in the book market, it is shown that the selling of books in the Netherlands has decreased significantly, and, moreover, that the function and use of literature in the age of new media has changed considerably. Yet, allegations vis-à-vis the market having marginalized literature and the predominance of a media-driven mass culture can easily lead to unfounded presentism. It is argued that the perspective might be reversed by looking at the literary past from the 19^th century onwards as a period in which market, commercial drives and media culture came to the fore as well. This approach may result in a more encompassing attention to the societal embeddedness of literary culture, past and present.

Though claims of a crisis in Dutch literary studies are in the air, the diagnosis is far from clear. Against this background, the article argues that first of all, systematic research into the practices and dynamics of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination in literary studies from a historical perspective is needed. As a step into this direction the article undertakes a case study of the explicit motivations of research on textual transformations in the Netherlands of the last 40 years. The findings are placed into the context of what seem to be general tendencies of the discipline over the last decades, touching among other things upon general discussions of quality standards in the humanities.