Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 57, Issue 2, 2019

This article is about the relation of three literary texts to psychological stage theories. The texts under discussion are a novel by Dutch novelist Maarten ’t Hart (De aansprekers, 1979) and stories by Flemish writer Kristien Hemmerechts (‘Fasen’, 1996) and German author Daniel Kehlmann (‘Rosalie geht sterben’, 2009). This article especially focusses on the stage theory of dying, as formulated by the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. For each of the three texts it is argued whether there is an intertextual relation to Kübler-Ross’s work or an interdiscursive relation to stage theories in general. It is thus demonstrated how these literary texts contribute to the dissemination of knowledge about stage theories, attesting to their popularity while at the same time critically evaluating them. By means of this demonstration, it is explained how literature is able to reflect upon the interaction between knowledge and normative views.

While Dutch literary studies are in a critical situation according to many, this is less often heard with regard to Dutch linguistics. Against this background, the article analyses recent inaugural lectures of Dutch literary scholars (from the Netherlands and from Germany) with regard to types of knowledge-production that can be taken from these lectures. It turns out that the accumulation of specific disciplinary knowledge does not seem to be the dominant programme of literary studies of modern Dutch literature in the Netherlands.

In this paper, I analyse the Dutch construction of the type want/omdat X from the perspective of the concept of hidden complexity. I show that while the traditional use of the conjunctions want ‘because’ and omdat ‘because’ followed by an independent or a dependent clause, respectively, is overtly more complex in that it uses more language material, its hidden complexity is low. The constructions of the type want/omdat X, on the other hand, are overtly less complex, but demonstrate a higher degree of hidden complexity. The interpretation of the constructions of this type is namely context-dependent and relies heavily on extralinguistic discursive knowledge on the side of the listener/reader.