Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 55, Issue 2, 2017

Dye Cronijcke van Zeelandt (The Chronicles of Zeelandt) is a philosophical study of the nature of Zeeland, and reveals its essence to be that of a never-ending metamorphosis of land into sea, sea into land, with immediate effects on the fortunes and wealth of the inhabitants. The book is the outcome of an ambitious, large-scale investigation, aiming to subvert the cycles of (divine) destruction that (allegedly) result from human negligence, ignorance and bad governance. The first step it takes in overturning the vicious cycle is the attempt to transform the community of interest (the inhabitants) into a community of knowledge. It does so by creating a record of past cycles of metamorphoses organized chronologically and geographically, also by chorographic and cartographic means. This record aims to instruct contemporaries to take care of the dikes that protect the lands and ports of plenty. The philosophical vision of the book does not reveal itself easily to a modern reader, who might be deceived by its methods of copia and chronology in the presentation of its wealth of particulars. A variety of literary and visual forms is used to shape the author’s vision into an instruction for the community of interest as knowledge community.

The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet (D’Amboinsche Rariteitkamer), published in Amsterdam in 1705, is one of the first scholarly works on crustaceans, molluscs, shells and conches as well as minerals and stones in a European vernacular. The author of the book, the VOC merchant and historian of nature Georg Everhard Rumphius, arrived in the Moluccas in 1654 and lived on the island of Ambon until his death in 1702. The historical figure of Rumphius and his texts prove that the production and reception of knowledge about natural history was situated in cultural contact between Asian and European actors. A key factor for the accumulation of information and the mobility of knowledge were manners of representation and means of organising knowledge. In Rumphius’ case, this included rhetorical devices and strategies commonly used in other genres such as histories or travel writing. This paper analyses the poetics of knowledge of the Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet by focussing on the categories of wonder, trade, power, and incorporation. Behind the admiration for newly discovered and rare objects by individual European actors, military conflicts and commercial interests come into view. Like colonial commodities transported to Europe, colonial knowledge was incorporated into the European body of knowledge about natural history.

This article studies the complex relation between literature and knowledge by focusing on the use of lists in poetry. The list is a simple yet functional tool for the organization of information. It moreover guides the memory and helps to structure our lives and the world around us. The list form is, in brief, dominantly present in daily life. Lists are therefore also often integrated in literature. In a literary context the list can both enhance plausibility and recognition or summon a sphere of alienation and enchantment.

The Dutch author K. Schippers often uses lists and enumerations in his work. Although the technique of enumeration is often regarded as essential for the medium of poetry, the use of lists is a rather atypical poetic technique. Schippers’ poetical lists are moreover positioned on the verge of the literary: they often seem to be both pragmatic and literary at the same time. Using the medium of the list Schippers reflects on cognition and cunningly defies the idea of our ‘natural’ perception of reality. That way Schippers’ poems often remind of a laboratory in which concepts such as language, perception and knowledge are cautiously analyzed. This article demonstrates how Schippers cleverly combines both scientific and literary effects in order to reveal new insights about the interaction between literature, art, science and knowledge.

This paper explores the way fictional texts activate, integrate and organize knowledge by focussing on the epistemological frame that fictional scenarios provide. I will provide a case-study of three Dutch-language novels from the early 20th century which depict merchants and business-men. The merchant is a well-established literary character situated at the cross-section of economic, literary-historiographic, and – especially in the case of Dutch literature – imagologic discourses of knowledge. I will analyse the structuring of interfering knowledge domains and the affirmation and/or transformation of mental concepts of economy. By that, I intend to contribute to understanding the literary epistemology that shapes the relationship of texts and their readers.

This article investigates how different narrating strategies influence the way in which we acquire historical knowledge through narrative. It analyses description and reference as narrating strategies that signalize that what is told is consonant with reality (emersive narrating strategies). These narrating strategies are commonly used in non-fictional texts. Immersive strategies are a different set of narrating strategies like dramatized scenes, focalisation, and secondary illusion that aim at creating the illusion that what is told is present in the moment of reading. While immersive strategies are usually expected in fictional contexts, I show that they can also be found in texts whose main purpose is to represent reality like the popular historiographical texts De duizelingwekkende jaren (2009) [The Vertigo Years,2008] by Philipp Blom or In Europa (2004) [In Europe, 2008] by Geert Mak. The chore of this article is to explain why in certain contexts immersive strategies can be used to support the idea that the text gives a reliable picture of a (past) reality. Using the rhetorical concepts of evidentia and energeia I show why appealing to the reader’s imagination by giving the impression that the reader is part of the narrated world can be productively integrated into a narration whose main aim is to communicate factual knowledge.