Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2013

The Middle Dutch plays Esmoreit, Gloriant and Lanseloet, three of the four abele spelen contained in the Hulthem Manuscript, not only belong to the earliest secular theatre literature that has survived from the Middle Ages, they are also the only texts of their time in which a dramatization of chivalric themes and ethics has been preserved. It is true that some of the Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, a collection of miracle plays staged by a confraternity of Parisian goldsmiths between 1339 and 1382, also have been inspired by chivalric romances and show a tendency towards secularization, but in essence they remain religious dramas and do not call into question the generic uniqueness of the abele spelen. But, as many scholars have observed, this does not preclude a possible relation, even of ‘influence’, on the level of the narrative contents, the subject matters or the dramatic structures as such. In this article, I examine the possible affinities between the abele spelen and those of the Miracles which have been deemed to be ‘more secular’ by literary historians, especially the relation put forward by Jacques Tersteeg between Esmoreit and Du roy Thierry, the 32nd of the Miracles. In contrast to Tersteeg I argue that Du roy Thierry was not the (or a) source of Esmoreit, but that both have been inspired by the epic romance Theseus de Cologne (probably about 1364). As Gloriant on the other hand appears to have drawn a number of its central features from Baudouin de Sebourc, another chivalric romance so to speak contemporaneous of Theseus, it becomes apparent that the abele spelen are first of all related to these two French romances - and perhaps a few others - from the (beginning of the) second half of the fourteenth century. To conclude, I conduct a tentative exploration of what these observations imply on the level of comparative ethics and ideology.

This article explores some eye-catching formal characteristics of the so-called humanitarian variant of literary expressionism as it emerged in the postwar Flemish literary context around 1920, such as the frequent use of rhetorical apostrophe. In particular, it focuses on the typical enunciative patterns in the avant-garde poetry written by Paul van Ostaijen, Wies Moens and Victor Brunclair in the years 1918-1921. What distinguishes these poetical experiments from the more classical kinds of poetry of that time, it is argued, is the fact that the complex enunciative structures of these poems are foregrounded, due to, for instance, the multiplication of the enunciative roles, the underdetermination of these roles, and the changing nature of the relations between these roles.

The autobiographical genre, booming these days, has aroused interest of pragmatic literary approaches that focus on the effects of a text on the reader. They do not highlight questions about the demarcation of the autobiographical genre, but focus on why a reader reads a novel as an autobiographical text. Therefore, the effect of authenticity is the central point. This approach requires attention to intratextual strategies and to stylistic devices. In this article I will concentrate on the kind of stylistic devices that function as autobiographical and authenticity markers. I will illustrate these by analysing fragments from the novel «Het lied en de waarheid» by Helga Ruebsamen and the autobiographical text «Walsenkoning» by Louis Ferron.

Debatten over migratie en multiculturaliteit in Nederland en Vlaanderen stonden het afgelopen decennium veelal in het teken van bedreiging en ondergang. Enerzijds kenmerkte het gebruik van metaforen die gevaar en drama suggereren de manier van spreken over de komst en aanwezigheid van migranten. Anderzijds overheerste een doemscenario de wijze waarop de toekomst van de multiculturele samenleving retorisch in beeld werd gebracht. Het toekomstbeeld dat werd geschetst was er één van achteruitgang, verlies en verval. Ingrijpen en een halt toeroepen leken absoluut onvermijdelijk om dit alles te voorkomen. Indien ‘de politiek’ – en jij en ik – niet snel onze ogen zouden openen en de ernst van de situatie zouden gaan inzien, zou het gedaan zijn met ‘Nederland’, althans zo was de suggestie. Dan zou de gevaarlijke, het sociale evenwicht ondermijnende potentie die in de komst en aanwezigheid van migranten schuilt, vrij komen; Dan was het einde van de stabiele, welvarende natie zo goed als zeker in zicht. Oftewel, in veelvuldig gebruikte metaforen: we spelen met vuur en de apocalyps dreigt.