Gillis Dorleijn

The eighteenth-century literary field in Western Europe: the interdependence of material and symbolic production and consumption

Abstract The papers of this special issue are introduced as intances of a field-theoretic approach as articulated initially in Bourdieus institutional analysis of the literary field. This approach is presented as a sound alternative to traditional literary history and its insufficiently relational view of historiography and of the cultural object. In addition, it is situated critically with respect to book history and previous institutional analyses in a historical perspective. It focuses on the development of a literary field in eighteenth-century Western Europe, at a time when the term ‘literature’ meant something quite different from what it means nowadays. In the cultural-sociological perspective advocated here, one must take account of the interdependency of material and symbolic production and consumption. Therefore, an approach is needed which integrates institutional analysis with an examination of the impact of conceptions of literature, that is, sets of normative ideas on the nature and function of literature. These conceptions affect the practices of all agents in the field, irrespective of whether they focus on symbolic or material production, or even on consumption.

Challenging the Autonomous Realm of Literature: Nieuwe Zakelijkheid and Poetry in the Dutch Literary Field

The term Nieuwe Zakelijkheid has mainly been used to indicate prose not poetry during the 1930s in Dutch literary criticism and academic criticism; literary historiography followed this practice. This contribution shows that Nieuwe Zakelijkheid and poetry are nevertheless closely intertwined in Dutch discourse of the interwar period. The generation of poets that announced themselves in the early 1930s were deeply affected by it and the critics pointing out to their poetic products classified them as nieuw-zakelijk accordingly. The use of Nieuwe Zakelijkheid takes place in an international context of an upcoming generation advocating a new way of life, burying the past, cleaning the slate with an urgent aspiration to build a new existence on a radically different basis. Poetry of that time and its reception should be understood in the context of this new mentality. This wide-ranging process of generational change becomes visible in the critics’ classification behavior and the self-fashioning activities of the poets in the Netherlands. A final point of attention is related to the relative autonomy of the Dutch literary field of that time. In the viewpoint of those participating in the literary field, literature has acquired an autonomous position, but nieuw-zakelijke poetry and the discourse of the new modern mentality appeared to challenge this particular status. This contribution gives an outline of the problem poets and critics were confronted with and the way they tried to find a way out and preserve the autonomous realm of poetry.

Het gedicht als strategie: Een demonstratie

A strategic reading of a poem has become common ground. Programmatic poems with statements on art and literature are not seldom interpreted as a strategic maneuver of an author trying to position himself and his work. But what if the poem is not overtly programmatic and does not contain any explicit positioning statement? It is argued that exactly this type of ‘regular’ poem can be viewed upon as an strategic author’s act just as well. This is demonstrated by means of three cases. The first case, a famous poem by Willem Kloos, shows that this ‘regular’ poem has strategic aspects due to its particular selection of textual characteristics (Meizoz’s ‘option esthetique’). Case two and three produce two instances of religious poetry (one Roman Catholic, the other Calvinist) in which the authors make textual choices in order to legitimate themselves as poets writing real poetry that is up to the standards of the dominant literary regime while at the same time complying to the norms of their own religious communities. After this, the article harks back to Kloos’ poem in order to add some elements regarding its strategic context: an individual issue of a literary journal as a discurcive place in which the poem is published as a tactical move in a specific literary game. Finally, it is stated that the three cases are intended to demonstrate the way a textual analysis can play a role in research questions regarding institutional contexts.

Het einde van de literatuur? : Over de bestudering van literaire cultuur en haar belang

Rejecting internal analyses of the end of literature like the one by William Marx, the article argues that in order to assess the current position of literature an external scope is paramount. The book market seems to be the proper context to analyze the phenomenon literature. On the basis of recent research on literary institutions and using the latest data concerning trends in the book market, it is shown that the selling of books in the Netherlands have decreased significantly, and, moreover, that the function and use of literature in the age of new media has changed considerably. Yet, allegations vis-a-vis the market having marginalized literature and the predominance of a media-driven mass culture can easily lead to unfounded presentism. It is argued that the perspective might be reversed by looking at the literary past from the 19th century onwards as a period in which market, commercial drives and media culture came to the fore as well. This approach may result in a more encompassing attention to the societal embeddedness of literary culture, past and present.

Modellen in de Nederlandse literatuur: De jaren 1900-1920. Een inleiding

In Dutch literary history, the timespan between 1900 and 1920 has often been conceived of as a period of relative calm and stability in contrast to the preceding fin-de-siecle years and the years following World War I. Recent publications, however, broadening their scope from the canonical literary texts and the major authors to a more comprehensive view on literary culture, have revealed that the first decades of the 20th century saw important changes in the structure of the literary field, alongside (and in close connection to) the emergence of new cultural practices. This special issue of Nederlandse Letterkunde wants to chart some of these changes, ranging from the rise of new genres and new ideas about literature and authorship, to a reorganization of the institutional infrastructure of literature. In the introduction we argue that, to analyze such phenomena, it is fruitful to focus on the development, reinterpretation and circulation of literary and cultural models, since all cultural behavior is model-based, as are cultural artifacts, which might in turn function as models themselves for new practices or products. To illustrate the possibilities of the concept ‘model’ we present a brief case study on the literary interview, a media genre emerging internationally at that time, followed by some general reflections on the ‘model’ approach in literary and cultural studies.