Hoofdstukken over S. Vestdijk

Contains fulltext : 18967_hoofovs_v.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Today it is hard to imagine that during his lifetime S. Vestdijk (1898-1971) was considered to be one of the most important Dutch authors. In literary criticism he was one of the standards against which such influential critics as Hans Gomperts and Kees Fens judged new authors and works of literature and his essays on prose and poetry influenced many researchers in academic literary studies. In the eighties and nineties this situation changed; his work was not only reprinted less and less, but a new generation of critics and researchers simply did not consider his work relevant for the study of literature anymore. It is safe to say that one of the reasons why Vestdijk's omnipresence in Dutch literature is over, is that Vestdijk studies (in which the journal Vestdijkkroniek played a central role) failed to keep up with new developments in literary theory. It is not difficult to detect an even hostile attitude towards, for instance, poststructuralism; this is symptomatic for the attitude towards theory in the academic study of Dutch literature in general. This thesis, however, is by no means a poststructuralist exercise. It just wants to demonstrate that by taking into account new ideas in the study of literature (new in the context of Vestdijk studies, that is) particularly Vestdijk's essays on modernist authors can be read in terms of his discovery of the problem of language; mythology is a way, if not the only possibility, of solving that problem138 p