scholarly journals Stranger spaces: Embodiment, space and language in the collaborative life writing novel The Fortune Finder

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. BB84-BB101
Author(s):  
Anne Klomberg

The present study takes The Fortune Finder (2008) by Edward van de Vendel and Anoush Elman as a case in point to demonstrate how interactions between material bodies, space and power constitute some characters as strangers or, in other words, as bodies deemed out-of-place. The novel is an example of collaborative life writing and describes how a young, Afghan refugee and his family flee the Taliban regime and seek asylum in the Netherlands. Building on Sara Ahmed’s work (2000), I demonstrate how their bodies are recognised as stranger bodies through a demarcation of social spaces, which involves including or excluding particular bodies based on matters of normativity and deviance. Protagonist Hamayun and his family are implicated in shifting relationships with power and space that cause their bodies to be recognised as out-of-place in various ways, dependent on their circumstances. The notion of dwelling takes centre stage in these dynamics. It denotes the actual spaces that Hamayun and his family (are allowed to) inhabit, but it also features in a metaphor that links friendship with spaces of belonging. An implied lack thereof suggests how Hamayun eventually seems to perceive himself as a kind of stranger.

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 174-196
Author(s):  
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar ◽  
Krina Huisman

In this article the authors analyse a collection of essays written by young Dutch people who grew up in the Reformed Liberated Church, a small Christian denomination in the Netherlands. Traditionally, this church is characterised by its inwards nature: members strive to live their lives within the confinements that the church and its institutions stipulate. This has changed over the last few decades and the essays attest to the effects these changes have had on individual lives. We discuss the underlying narrative structure of their accounts and how the authors negotiate different lifestyles and interpretations of the Christian faith on either side of the borders that demarcate the Reformed Liberated tradition. We discuss if – and how – the essays work towards an outcome of ‘discordant concordance’ (Ricœur) where narrative identities remain whole, despite relatively drastic border crossings in the course of the lives that formed them. We address how these stories give insight into how people use the stories they tell to define what needs to be remembered and forgotten when we cross borders. Finally, we discuss the relevance of these essays and our analysis of them for our understanding of today’s globalised and multicultural societies in which many are in a permanent state of transition. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on February 17th and published on August 28th 2017.


Werkwinkel ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 65-88
Author(s):  
Timothy Pareit

Abstract Although scholars in the Netherlands have already attempted to integrate literary theories on migration with the specific Dutch context, none such attempts have so far been made for Flemish literature. The current paper therefore scrutinises the novel Los by Tom Naegels, an (autobiographical) account of the riots in Borgerhout (Antwerp) after the murder on Islam teacher Mohamed Achrak in 2002. As the author also covered these events as a journalist, the analysis investigates the manner in which this topical matter is intertwined with the more personal story about the struggle conducted by Naegels’s grandfather for euthanasia. The paper leans on Jérôme Meizoz’s posture theory, which differentiates the author figure from the biographical person and the narrator. In addition, the novel is situated within the contemporary literary return towards realism and Flemish literature’s negotiation of Flemish identity. By focussing on these three elements – the theme of migration, realism and Flemish identity – the paper attempts to contribute to the development of a literary theory on migration in Flanders.


2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Else F. de Ridder ◽  
Max D. B. Hoeboer ◽  
Anne F. D. M. van Dam ◽  
Job van den Bosch

Abstract More than a million times every year, an ambulance is deployed in the Netherlands. Of these instances, 87% of the patients will be administered intravenous (IV) fluids. In the current situation, the IV bag always needs to be held above the patient to function properly. This action requires an extra pair of hands, which is very inefficient and can result in the loss of precious time that could otherwise be directed at the patient. Besides needing an extra pair of hands, there is also a chance of air bubbles entering the patient through the drip feed. The novel drip chamber design proposed in this paper aims to solve these problems, as it enables the IV bag to be placed in any orientation and in any manner relative to the patient with a negligible number of air bubbles entering the drip feed. This novel drip chamber was tested in an experimental setting in different orientations and at different flowrates. From the test results, it can be concluded that at a clinical relevant flowrate, a negligible number of air bubbles were present within the IV system. Because of the ease of use of the novel drip chamber and the fact that it is fool-proof, cost-efficient, and shows promising test results, future research on several aspects could make this product a promising addition to health care.


Literator ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 107-120
Author(s):  
B. Van der Westhuizen

Simon Vestdijk is one of the most prominent figures in the literary awareness of the Netherlands. From an intertextual study between De toekomst der religie (The Future of Religion) and De koperen tuin (The Copper Garden) it emerges that the postulated view of reality is transposed in narrative form in the text-internal vision of reality in the novel. This transformation is concretized and manifested in visible terms in the character portrayal, especially with regard to music as the passion to which the main character dedicates himself. The many references to music in the novel gradually gain importance as a motif that becomes a symbol of different kinds of love. In the course of the narrative, and especially towards the end of it, there is a substitution of religious value contents in the main character who is led to humanistic love through music, so that this process of transvaluation of religion (in the wider sense of the word) becomes the main emphasis of the discourse of the novel, albeit in veiled form.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. R19-R26
Author(s):  
Marijke Huisman

Review of Hans Renders & Binne de Haan ed., Theoretical discussions of biography. Approaches from history, microhistory and life writing (Edwin Mellen Press; Lewiston 2013) and Binne de Haan, Van kroon tot bastaard. Biografie en het individuele perspectief in de geschiedschrijving [From prince to pauper. Biography and the individual perspective in historiography] (Groningen University Press; Groningen 2015) This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on 20 August 2015 and published on 22 November 2015.


Author(s):  
Yuliia Honcharova ◽  
Victoriia Lipina

The idea advanced in the paper is to theorize the mechanisms of autobiographicality in Stephen Dixon’s novels that are viewed as a radical renewal of autobiographical narrative, where the modality of disappearance/return of the subject produces a new mode of life-writing. We propose the term “autobiographical transgression” to capture the essence of this renewal started by three representative figures – John Barth, Stephen Dixon, and Joseph Heller that can be reduced neither to autobiography as a genre, nor to “transgressive autobiography” as its generic variant. Dixon finds a new form for representing autos. He creates the character with the name-deixis I. that personifies a fiduciary subject, thus, suggesting a provocative restatement of postmodernist generic problems. In the novels I. and End of I. the autobiographical hero I. exists simultaneously as a metaphor of the author’s presence in the text, as the subjective author’s I and as a character in the novel − an objectified, semi-functional, distancing I. The transplanting of life experience manifests itself in a special kind of repersonalization and double coding of the traditional autobiographical subject.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. BB1-BB4
Author(s):  
Helma Van Lierop-Debrauwer ◽  
Jane Mcveigh ◽  
Monica Soeting

On 24 and 25 October 2019, a conference on life writing for young readers took place at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. This conference was organised by Helma van Lierop, Jane McVeigh and Monica Soeting. The main issue of the conference was that of boundaries with respect to authorship and readership in life writing.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. VC56-VC84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marijke Huisman

In recent years life writing scholars have increasingly linked the autobiographical genre to human rights causes, such as abolitionism. This article aims to historicize and contextualize the presupposed connection between human rights and the human subject of autobiographical discourse by focusing on the cultural mobility of Anglo-American slave narratives. Tracing their presence in the Netherlands since the late eighteenth century, it is demonstrated that slave narratives were considered of no value to Dutch abolitionism and Dutch debates on slavery and its legacy until very recently. Publishers and readers did, however make sense of slave narratives as sensational, gothic literature. Furthermore, the narratives were appropriated by Dutch fundamentalist Protestants advocating the nation’s emancipation from its state of spriritual “slavery”. Only when secularization converged with post-colonial migration patterns new interpretations stressing Black experience, agency, and subjectivity came to the fore in the Netherlands. Inspired by African-American rhetoric, Afro-Dutch migrants appropriated slave narratives in order to break the public silence on the Dutch history of slavery. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing in June 2014 and published in April 2015.


Author(s):  
Laura Marcus

Few of the great modernist writers produced explicit or fully fledged autobiographies, but the expansion of the ‘life-writing’ category has made visible the prevalence of autobiographical novels, including works by Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf. ‘Autobiographies, autobiographical novels, and autofictions’ explains that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was an increasingly ‘aesthetic’ approach to autobiography. New genres arose that blended life-writing and fiction, such as the personal essay, the ‘imaginary portrait’, and novels which incorporated authentic letters and journal entries. Since the 1980s, it is argued, the novel has been eclipsed by autobiographical narrative, reversing the earlier sense that autobiographical writing was of secondary importance.


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