New Germans, New Dutch : Literary Interventions

Abstract

Foundation Palimpsest supports the publication of excellent scientific research in the academic discipline of cultural analysis, among other things by subsidizing the book series Palimpsest: Disorientation.The book series Palimpsest: Disorientation addresses the culture of war, civil war, violence and conflict. It aims to rethink the discourse of war and enmity, and in doing so it hopes to contribute to the undermining of the stereotyping frames, without which no war can be waged.The book series first term, Palimpsest, (the scraped-off parchment roll) suggests the layeredness, opacity and density of cultural objects and processes, and therefore also their rich possibilities towards rereading and revision. The second term, Disorientation, refers to the need to explore and subvert the expediently enforced boundary between East and West, a violent borderline that was incessantly addressed in the work of Inge E. Boer, in whose honour this book series is established. Disorientation, in its more common sense, is also a productive force. For disorienting forms of rereading disable the stereotypical ways of reading, which are so seamlessly evoked by dominant worldviews.

Tenacious Displacement of Home in Mohamed Dellal’s “When the Wind of the Atlas Blows”

“…The transnational models surpass such binary hierarchies. Minnaard (2008) prefers to approach Moroccan Dutch authors with a view to the national concerns solely. She said: "national identity remains a central factor in any reflection on the (future of) contemporary globalizing world, both as discursive concept and as a field of contesting discourse.…”

Oscillating between Margin and Centre: Dutch Literature of Migration

“…It combines analyses of textual features -such as the use of narrative strategies -and plays with generic conventions or forms of figurative language, paying attention to the way in which the text functions within the broader processes of cultural signification. Examples of this approach can be found in the work of Henriëtte Louwerse (1997Louwerse ( , 2001Louwerse ( , 2004aLouwerse ( , 2007De Graef and Louwerse 2000), Isabel Hoving (2005Hoving ( , 2006, Rosemarie Buikema (2005) and Liesbeth Minnaard (2005Minnaard ( , 2006Minnaard ( , 2008Minnaard ( , 2009, four female scholars who share an affinity with the field of Gender Studies.…”

Melancholia, Migration, and Mise en Scène. Comparing Else Lasker-Schüler and Emine Sevgi Özdamar

“…The aim is to make the audience understand that all social relations can be changed. ‘The actor has to show the social coherence of people’, Brecht argues, which in drama terms means that the personality of the protagonists should be composed before the eyes of the audience, ‘who […] will remember this forever.’ 49 The detached, non-emotional look of Özdamar's narrator and her detachment even in the most drastic circumstances have intrigued readers and are usually interpreted as the unprejudiced attitude of the stranger toward an unknown world 50 . According to this logic the protagonist's environments, be it the home community or the terra incognita , are the object of the detached look of what Hannah Arendt calls the ‘schlemil’, i.e.…”