oa Icarus in de schaduw

Icarus in the shadow. Peter Verhelst’s posture as a paratopic poet

This article focuses on the institutional career of the Flemish author Peter Verhelst (1962) as a poet, without losing sight of the rest of his oeuvre that also includes novels and theatre. I specifically would like to contrast from a diachronic perspective Verhelst’s ‘posture’ (J. Meizoz) with the way he stages his image as a poet in his own writings. The poetry books I would like to use for this are Witte bloemen (1991), Verhemelte (1996) and its relationship with Alaska (2003), Zoo van het denken (2011) and Wij totale vlam (2015). A comparative analysis of the different ‘ethè’ (D. Maingueneau) that the texts contain, enables us to nuance the trajectory and the positioning of the author in the literary field, as it appears that his posture is expressly determined by the staging of a paratopic (D. Maingueneau) sense of identity.