Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 48, Issue 3, 2010

The poem ‘Een psalm voor het smelten’ which Leo Vroman (° 1915) wrote as a reaction to the attack on the New York Twin Towers, illustrates his particular way of writing poetry, his playful and unpretentious use of the language, the surprising combination of a scientifical perspective and human emotion, and a lively tone, offering the reader comfort for his anxieties and fear of death. ‘Een psalm voor het smelten’ was published in the volume Tweede verschiet (2003). It is one of a series of psalms that Vroman wrote in this period and in which he addresses a ‘System’, his particular designation of an ordering principle in life. Vroman’s poem strikes us – and this all the more when compared with other poems on 9/11 – by its unusual perspective, its deliberate refraining from each form of drama, its concentration on the transformation of materials as if describing a physical process and its almost shockingly peaceful depiction of the drama, ending up in a simple statement of complete helplessness. In this way Vroman’s poem avoids the direct melodrama that characterizes many verses on 9/11.

This article presents an analysis of the rhetorical and stylistic methods adopted by Hadrian Junius (1511-1575) in the seventeenth chapter of his Batavia (1588), in which he aimed to argue that printing was invented by Laurens Janszoon Coster of Haarlem. The mythical status of the Coster Legend is, at present, uncontested and well documented, but Junius’ rhetorical argument, inspired by conversations with prominent citizens of Haarlem, has never before been subjected to such thorough analysis. This article makes it clear that Junius’ primary intention was not to convey facts, but to deliver a deliberate mythologisation of an already well-established legend about the invention of printing in Haarlem. He presented this mythologisation as a classical plea against the followers of Gutenberg.

This article discusses research on Dutch literature at universities in German-speaking countries since 1990. It appears that literary scholars in Dutch departments show a particular interest in a comparative approach. Dutch literature is studied in its international context and questions about, for example, the German reception of Dutch texts, German translations of Dutch literature and imagological topics are clearly dominant.

Even leek het erop dat de Europese meertaligheid een net zo serieus onderwerp zou kunnen zijn als het verkeer, het klimaat of misschien zelfs als de visserij. Vanaf 2007 had de EU immers een heuse ‘commissaris voor meertaligheid’, de Roemeen Leonard Orban. Voor die tijd maakte dit onderwerp altijd deel uit van de portefeuille van de commissaris voor onderwijs en cultuur. En, meer nog, de commissie maakte in het kader van haar ‘Framework Programme 6’ ook veel geld vrij voor twee reusachtige onderzoeksprojecten over het belang van meertaligheid voor Europa: het ‘integrated project’ DYLAN (www.dylan-project.org) en het ‘network of excellence’ LINEE (www.linee.info).

Sinds het einde van de jaren tachtig zijn Nederlandse en Vlaamse romanciers zich in toenemende mate bezig gaan houden met de maatschappelijke actualiteit. In zijn veelbesproken boek De revanche van de roman (2009) zag Thomas Vaessens, hoogleraar aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam, er zelfs een terugkeer van het engagement in.