Andringa, Els (Hg.) (2017). Avantgarde & Exil – Ludwig Kunz als Kulturvermittler. Autor und Vermittler zwischen den Künsten und Sprachen. Zürich: LIT. 319 p. ISBN 978-3-643-90572-7. €34,90. (reeks ...Anpassung – Selbstbehauptung – Widerstand; 37)
The (de)construction of the ethnic other in the novel Schaamte (1972) by Hugo Claus Schaamte (Shame) is a complex and obscure novel in which Hugo Claus ridicules the postcolonial, imperialistic ...attitude of the members of a European film crew spending a working holiday on a sunny island. This article uses the analytic concept of othering as it was coined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to investigate the ways in which the novel ironically constructs the identity of the native people on the island as different from and inferior to that of the tourists. It demonstrates how it makes use of strategies of exclusion, which are based on naive ideas and misconceptions, to keep the islanders at a social distance. But exclusion is only one side of the story. What will be shown is that Schaamte deals with the warring forces of exclusion and inclusion, distance and relationship, difference and exchange. The novel ultimately reveals the crossover between the two groups and deconstructs the demarcation line between cultural identities (the discursive opposition between self/other or us/them). It blurs the idea of cultural identity as a unitary totality.
The adventures of a schoolgirl. Dorothea van Male, Schola Nostra (1971), and Hugo Claus’s rewriting practice While Hugo Claus’s oeuvre has been studied abundantly (and fruitfully) from the ...perspective of erudite intertextuality, the rewriting of popular narrative culture in his novels has been neglected. This one-sided focus has clouded the protean nature of Claus’s texts, in which high and low, literate and vulgar coexist. By means of a case-study on the experimental novel Schola Nostra (1971), this article demonstrates the significance of popular narrative culture for the understanding of Claus’s oeuvre. Schola Nostra caused a lot of interpretative difficulties for contemporary literary critics, who dismissed it as a senseless ‘curiosity cabinet’; the novel has been overlooked ever since. By introducing reading keys which take Claus’s rewriting of literary as well as popular genres into account, it is however possible to shed light on this volatile publication. The approach is twofold: the first reading key is provided by the popular genre of the girl’s book, the second is related to the rewriting of markedly literary genres. This combination of reading perspectives enables a meaningful interpretation of the work; at the same time, it reveals Schola Nostra’s opposition to unambiguous reading schemes. By doing so, the analysis provides new poetical and interpretative tools to study the author’s novelistic oeuvre.
This article offers an in-depth reading of the poetic cycle Het graf van Pernath (1977; Pernath’s Tomb) by the Flemish author and novelist Hugo Claus (1929-2008). The cycle is only one of the many ...tributes to the prominent post-experimental Flemish poet Hugues C. Pernath, who died in 1975. First, the present article shows how Het graf van Pernath displays a complex attitude towards the genre tradition of the tombeau littéraire in particular and funerary poetry in general. Claus’s poems intricately respect, oppose and transform both traditional formal conventions of the genre and dominant conceptions of death and grief. Second, this article demonstrates how Claus’s exploration of the funerary tradition goes hand in hand with an exploration of the genre of confessional poetry, which has become the dominant paradigm in the post-Romantic lyric. Indeed, Claus’s critical poetic homage to a befriended poet can also be interpreted as a critical unmasking of both authors’ very own poetic practice as a form of semantic deceit.
The wide range of Red Riding Hood versions is a sign of the fairy tale’s popularity. According to Judith Roof, the narrative itself produces multiple story variations. She does not approach narrative ...as a structural pattern but as a system of elements governed by certain rules. New versions of Red Riding Hood are the result of shifting and recombining story elements in relation to such rules and do not necessarily have to reinforce the heteronormative patriarchal order. I build upon Roof’s assumption about Red Riding Hood’s feminist potential, while focusing my attention on postwar Dutch fiction. More specifically, I examine an adaptation by Muslim feminist author Naema Tahir, in which the feminist potential is mainly realised by not depicting the Islamic religion as singularly female-oppressive.
The selection of a base text for textual edition is not only a matter of literary-historical data or a consideration based on the genetic process or the publishing history of a work of art. Depending ...on the poetical ideas of an editor one or another authorized text is chosen for the final edition. In that way the editor's choice determines the image of a literary work for a cultural community and does so for several years, if not for ever. Perhaps we have to make a difference between a scholarly edition, intended for researchers who work on the complete works by Claus, and an edition for an interested public (of non-scholars).
Tussen informatie en ideologie Eickmans, Heinz
Internationale neerlandistiek,
02/2019, Letnik:
57, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In the so-called ‘Leseland DDR’ anthologies of foreign literature played an exceptionally important part in making available foreign texts and in disclosing new literary worlds to the GDR reading ...public. Moreover, these anthologies could function as a proving ground for introducing new authors and literary schools without censorial objection. The anthologies contain peritexts by the publisher or editor – mainly blurbs and afterwords – that focus on the representative and innovative character of the texts and inform about the selection of authors, the general themes and content, the aesthetic quality and – in case of anthologies from western countries – provide critical remarks on the condemnable developments in capitalist societies. In this article I investigate and compare four GDR anthologies of literature from the Netherlands and Flanders, all published between 1976 and 1984. This will make clear that the ideological comments after the cultural and political ‘Wende’ in the GDR at the beginning of the seventies can no longer be considered obligatory bows for the censorial authorities.
The book that triggered the following case study appeared in 2004 and was published by Princeton University Press, which indicates both Princeton and Oxford on the title page, so we must suppose that ...one of the book’s identical twins came out simultaneously in England. 2 Some of these linguistic derivations are impossible to miss in Coetzee’s English translation: they are straightforward citations (even if the punctuation and lineation may have been changed), such as “O wild west wind, / thou breath of autumn’s being,” or, later on, “Oh, lift me as a wave, / a leaf, a cloud” (Coetzee, Landscape 55). The storm that in Shelley’s poem announces itself in the distance “Like the bright hair uplifted from the head // Of some fierce Maenad,” and that consists of “Black rain and fire and hail” (388–89), becomes, in Coetzee’s rendering of Claus, a scene in which “Black rain, fiery hail / descended / over his streaming / maenad headpiece” (51). Three of the five cantos in Shelley’s poem end with variants of “hear, O hear!” and in another of his lines the wind-swept clouds, like leaves, “Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean” (388); so one is left wondering why Coetzee turned this into “Hark, oh, hear / the branches of heaven and ocean / tangled in each other” (53).
Erwin Mortier's novel Marcel (1999) addresses the still controversial topic of the Flemish collaboration with the Germans during the Second World War, and the way the Belgian state subsequently dealt ...with it. Told from the perspective of a grandchild of the guilty generation, Mortier's novel has often been read as a narrative of emerging understanding and reconciliation. Seen through the prism of Amy Elias's concept of the historical sublime, the novel in fact suggests that the truth about the past remains inaccessible, even as the child protagonist is driven by a powerful desire to unveil it. Through the use of extended metaphors of signification, concealment and revelation, working in tandem with a narrative of a frequently disturbing sexual awakening, Marcel presents the urge to unveil the truth in and of history as a blind and desperate quest that is doomed to destroy the object of its desire.
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