Journal of Dutch Literature

The Dutch against Napoleon. Resistance Literature and National Identity, 1806-1813

Lotte Jensen

Literature must be considered as an important source for investigating the opposition against the Napoleonic Empire; throughout Europe there was a strong hidden flow of literature aimed at undermining the French military regime. This article discusses the case of Dutch resistance literature between 1806 and 1813 and argues that studying this type of literature fundamentally changes our perspective on those years. Not only can it be seen as an example of literary activism against Napoleon, it also offers us new insights in the rise of Dutch national thought and nationalism. Special attention is paid to the work of Jan Fredrik Helmers, Cornelis Loots, Hendrik Tollens and Adriaan Loosjes.

Mesmerized by Mysticism: The Transcendental Style of Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch

Peter Verstraten

The French filmmaker Bruno Dumont takes his inspiration from medieval mystic texts, since they teach us that spiritual matters can only be suggested via detours, never directly. His fascination with mysticism comes explicitly to the fore in (the title of) his fifth feature, Hadewijch, named after the well-known 13th century beguine who lived near Antwerp. This contribution examines how this film is informed by both her Poems in Stanzas, nowadays better known as Songs – about the violent longing for ‘Minne’ – and her Book of Visions on the visual perception of His Countenance. By staging an encounter between an ascetic virgin and a radical Muslim, Dumont’s Hadewijch seems concerned with addressing the thin line between God as Beloved and God as the Almighty Judge. I will then proceed to read the film through the lens of the ‘transcendental style’ of the cinema of Robert Bresson. This style shares with Hadewijch’s texts an attempt to explore the ‘limit of the unexpressive’, albeit that their strategies are contrasted, due to a difference in medium. The mystic writings are characterized by ‘abundant means’ – lyrical expressions full of passions – whereas Dumont’s cinematic style advocates sparse means – a humble aspect ratio, non-psychological acting, elliptical cutting, static closure – in a medium which is said to be ‘abundant at birth’.

What Can Stylometry Learn From Its Application to Middle Dutch Literature?1

Mike Kestemont

‘Stylometry’ is a rapidly evolving subdiscipline of computational philology, focusing on the quantitative study of (literary) style. In recent years, stylometry has had some interesting applications in the field of Middle Dutch studies, especially in the domain of authorship attribution and scribe identification. In this paper I will highlight and discuss the main insights gained in these contributions. It will appear that these studies raise some challenging issues that deserve stylometry’s careful consideration in coming years.

A Performance of Reality. Handwriting and Paper in Digital Literature

Yra van Dijk

Digital literature emphasizes its own medium, and it brings to the foreground the graphic, material aspects of language. Experiments with the new medium and with the form of language are generally presented and interpreted within a framework of the historical avant-garde or the neo-avant-garde. This article aims to take a new perspective on the emerging digital materiality of language.

The analysis of three works that remediate paper, the voice, the writing hand, or the physical presence of the author, leads to the conclusion that an ‘absent presence’ is given prominence. This paradoxical merging of presence and absence makes these forms of digital literature an expression of a specifically late postmodernist ambivalent stance regarding representation of the ‘real’. Complicity with the media culture goes hand in hand with an ironic approach of the mediatedness of the world and the body.

Review: Visual Practices and Invisible Boundaries

Lise Gosseye