Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde

Siegfried Huigen

Kwesties van literariteit en (dis)continuïteit in Nederlandstalige Zuid-Afrikaanse literatuur

Abstract -- In a recent article in this journal on the history of Dutch South African writing, Francken and Praamstra maintained that this literature should be studied from the perspective of literariness. Moreover, they asserted that within the corpus of Dutch South African writing and Dutch writing about South Africa there was no crucial break in the tradition, when Dutch was abolished as an official language in South Africa, in 1925. The current essay tries to demonstrate that they are on both accounts mistaken. First, literariness cannot be used as a concept to make distinctions within a corpus of writing which antedates an aesthetic understanding of literature. Secondly, from a system perspective of literature, Dutch South African writing came to a definite end in 1925. The essay concludes with a proposal to read Dutch South African writing as a 'Second World narrative'.

TNTL 125-3 (september 2009), 253-263