Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 17, Issue 3, 2012

In discussions on the social impact of literature, literary commitment is often opposed to literary autonomy. Within the field of Dutch literature, Willem Frederik Hermans is generally understood as one of the most important representatives and supporters of literary autonomy. Jean-Paul Sartre, on the other hand, is generally considered as one of the world’s most famous representatives and supporters of committed literature. In this article, Hermans’ and Sartre’s positions, however, are not conceived of as opposite stances, but as two different ways of understanding literature’s social relevance. It will be stated that both Hermans and Sartre seek to understand the writer’s social role, but that their views are based on fundamentally different world views and, subsequently, on different ideas of historical truth. Viewed from this perspective, Hermans’ work appears to be not opposed to literary commitment but rather shows what kind of literary commitment would be possible in a world where moral realism and ideological truths are highly problematic. One of Hermans’ least discussed novels, Ik heb altijd gelijk (1951), will be considered as an exemplary manifestation of this view.

Digital humanities’ is a discipline on the rise. But there still are a lot of prejudices to battle concerning the use of quantitative methods in literary analysis. This article presents an example of the way quantitative data can be used in a stylistic analysis. Our case study is the novel De asielzoeker by Arnon Grunberg. We relate Grunberg’s poetical standpoints on the nature and function of literature to his style of writing. Our article contains two linguistic analyses: an analysis of Grunberg’s use of causal connectives, and an analysis of his verb use. Goal of this research is to give an insight into the possibilities, but also the limitations of quantitative methods in literary-stylistic analysis

This article analyzes the literary non-fiction of Bart van Loo, especially his trilogy of books devoted to French literature and culture, De Frankrijktrilogie (2011). Developing Jim Collins’s penetrating account of ‘popular literary culture’ and of the ways in which literary classics are nowadays converted into entertaining ‘good reads’, the article argues that the literary tradition currently functions as a guide to the ‘good life’. Crucial here, as a comparison with Geerten Meijsing’s similar use of the Italian cultural heritage demonstrates, is the opposition between tasteless consumerism and an alternative, ‘literary’ form of lifestyle, which weds elegant literature to tasteful forms of fashion, tourism and gastronomy.

Songs aimed at the Dutch youth became a booming business in the Dutch Republic. In contemporary Western culture, such popular songs constitute an important vehicle for expressing youth identities. With regard to the Low Countries, it is this article’s hypothesis that in the booming business of songs composed by and for youngsters – loosely defined here as ‘unmarried young people’ – early stages of these modern processes of identity formation are visible. By exploring this vast and unique corpus and its functionality in the context of the NWO research project ‘Dutch Songs On Line’, this article aims to contribute to the international debate on youth identities, more specifically to the much debated question when ‘adolescence’ as a category was discovered: in the 19th century, or in the early modern era? Building on several trends in the existing literature the first part of this article will offer a framework for the analysis of the identity formation function of the songs for the early modern Dutch youth. The second part is dedicated to a case study: focusing on songs about and for students the potential of this type of research is explored.