Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde - Volume 137, Issue 3, 2021

Joannes Matthias Schrant (1783-1866) became the first professor of Dutch Language at the University of Ghent from 1818 to 1830 and was appointed professor at the University of Leiden from 1831 to 1853. Several scholars of Dutch studies have discussed Schrant’s scientific work and concluded that he was an unimportant and uninteresting figure, mainly for his insignificant role in the development of Dutch studies, because he only built upon the scientific ideas of Matthijs Siegenbeek and did not offer his own insights on language and literature. In this article, I adjust this negative view of Schrant as an insignificant figure by studying his scholarly work in the context of the ‘cultivation of culture’ (Leerssen 2006). Schrant was a typical cultivator of national culture: his speeches, literary histories, and editorial work show he was an active scholar who disseminated, sustained, and extended existing ideas about national culture. He did not just disseminate these ideas in his function of professor, but also as a member of the literary societies Regat Prudentia Vires and the Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde, and as a public intellectual.

This article contributes to the discussion between heteronomous and autonomous poetics, using Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s poetics as a case study. Pfeijffer explicitly adopts a more heteronomous pose in interviews and in essays following his Hoewordikeenberoemdschrijver? (2012). Critical reception examining Pfeijffers work prior to that publication has on the other hand largely concluded it to be ‘virtuous, but playful’. This article analyses that change by emphasising that his poetics have become ‘virtuous and engaged’, or in regards to his prose ‘postmodern and engaged’. The first chapter grounds the article in the discussion of the dichotomy between authorial autonomy and heteronomy, which will lead to a poetics of ‘heteronomous postmodernism’ that simultaneously values the heteronomous and the postmodernist. This concept is then used to analyse the implicit poetics of Pfeijffer’s latest novel Grand Hotel Europa (2018).