The so-called refugee crisis has triggered manifold responses in the field of European art and literature. This paper discusses two works by the Dutch writer Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer as examples of... Show moreThe so-called refugee crisis has triggered manifold responses in the field of European art and literature. This paper discusses two works by the Dutch writer Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer as examples of Dutch “refugee crisis literature”:his highly acclaimed novel La Superba(2013) and the short-story “Fatou yo” that was published in the text-collection Gelukszoekers(2015), but that is actually also a fragment from the aforementioned novel. I start my comparative discussion of these two texts by exploring the challenges and pitfalls in representing refugees in literature more in general, focusing on the seemingly inescapable trope of refugee victimhood and the humanitarian and empathic mind-set that “refugee crisis literature” mostly requires from its reader. Then I embark on an analysis of the two texts and of the way in which, as I will demonstrate, the texts position and, ultimately, manipulate their empathic reader. I will argue that the discomfort that results from this manipulation is considerably more effective within the frame-work of La Superba than within the Gelukszoekers- collection, despite the latter’s explicitly activist agenda. Show less
Making use of ideas and concepts from Barbara Cassin’s philosophy of translations and of l’histoire croisée, this essay explores the shared cultures of religious reading between the Dutch and... Show moreMaking use of ideas and concepts from Barbara Cassin’s philosophy of translations and of l’histoire croisée, this essay explores the shared cultures of religious reading between the Dutch and French languages in the late medieval period. While religious literature disseminated in both Dutch and German has received a fair amount of attention in recent scholarship, religious and devotional texts that were available to readers in both Dutch and French have remained understudied. By providing an overview of the most important religious literature that was translated from French into Dutch and the other way around, and of texts originally composed in Latin in the Low Countries and translated into both vernacular languages, we argue that textual mobility between the two languages was frequent and reciprocal. Case-studies of two texts – Pierre Michault’s La Danse aux aveugles and Gerrit van der Goude’s Boexken vander Missen – further indicate that changes – or the lack thereof – in texts that moved between the two languages point to shared cultures of religious reading on equal terms. Show less
