Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2016

The public intellectual as a literary populist. Leon de Winters public authorship

In this article, an analysis of Dutch literary writer Leon de Winters public authorship in 2012 is undertaken to achieve a better understanding of the way De Winter tries to combine his literary commitment with his desire for literary entertainment. Does De Winter portray himself as a public intellectual? Or is he an example of a contemporary literary celebrity? An analysis of the many media interventions of De Winter in 2012 will show that De Winter uses a discursive strategy that could best be described as populist (in the sense of Laclau’s On populist reason). An analysis of the novel VSV shows that the narrative construction of the literary thriller adds to the fame of literary celebrity and that its populist rhetoric underpins De Winters political position as a public figure. The case of De Winter shows that the desire to perform in the media not only influences authors’ media interventions but also changes the content and construction of the novels they publish.

The past here and now? The double illusion of reality in the historical novel

Until the middle of the twentieth century bringing history to life was considered one of the main qualities of the historical novel. With the emergence of the postmodern historical novel attention of literary scholars shifted towards ways in which the historical novel could critically reflect upon the possibility of representing a past reality in literary and non-literary texts. In this article I investigate the interrelation between both the construction and deconstruction of history in the historical novel. To get a more accurate picture I distinguish two forms of evoking reality in narrative: the impression that what is told is present and accessible for the reader during the reading process (immersive illusion) and the impression that what is told is consonant with reality (emersive illusion). Both forms of illusion are present in the historical novel and also in historiography, albeit with different rule patterns. By tracking the ways in which the two illusions interact I show the dynamics of illusion and illusion-breaking in the historical novel, but also in historiography. It then becomes clear that the experiments on narrating history in the postmodern historical novel are based on the distinction between factual and fictional texts that was doubted in the postmodern context.

Dutch literature and the Nobel Prize 1901-1965

Since 1901 no Dutch language author has won the Nobel Prize for literature, which is surprising for a language of 22 million speakers. In how far is it possible to explain this? Whereas much research on the prize is about rumours and guessing on poetics, this article turns towards sources that have not been used systematically before: the nomination database 1901-1964 of the Nobel Prize Organisation, recently updated with the year 1965. The article first reconstructs the Swedish nomination behaviour (four winners until 1965) as a background for an analysis of which Dutch authors were nominated by which institutions, and how often. It turns out that there are strong indications for a lack of professionalization in the Dutch literary field of the period and a relatively weak institutional autonomy of the literary field within the field of power in the Netherlands of that time. Finally, this interpretation will be held against the judgments of the Nobel Committee on the nominated Dutch authors.