Yra van Dijk

Leiden University | LEI · dutch studies

This essay explores the complex ways in which narrative may signify in the contemporary Caribbean cultural context. Specifically, it is concerned with a trilogy written by award-winning Surinamese author Astrid Roemer, set in the years of independence of the Caribbean country after 300 years of Dutch occupation. The analysis focuses not on the usua...

The memory of colonialism and slavery is finally becoming more widespread in the Netherlands. However, the field of literary studies still falls behind compared to the central place of the Dutch-Caribbean slavery past in recent societal debates. One of the reasons could be that the representation of trans-Atlantic slavery in literature is often obl...

In 2012, two curiously similar novels appeared in the Netherlands and the United States: Dave Eggers's A Hologram for the King and Arnon Grunberg's The Man without Illness. Both feature Western male protagonists who travel to the Gulf region for business purposes and utterly fail. This article explores these narratives as “fictions of globalization...

Mijn zuster de negerin (My Sister the Negro) is a novella from 1934 that was much admired by - amongst others - Menno ter Braak. Although it has now all but disappeared from academic curricula, it deserves a central place in postcolonial Literary Studies and in comparative Caribbean Culture Studies. The critical importance of the text for cultural...

With the large possibilities of online communication and participation, the character of art communities and institutions is going through fundamental changes. The World Wide Web, and the availability of mobile screens and interactive software, has altered authorship, processes of distribution, evaluation, and canonization. In the field of literatu...

The character of authorship, evaluation and production of artworks is being altered with new communication technologies. Online amateur and participatory work challenge the existing symbolic and economic structure of artistic fields. This article focuses on the function of an online digital community of amateur authors, considering the community as...

In this chapter, the author approaches the paratexts of digital literature from a post-structuralist point of view, according to which a paratext cannot be seen as simply outside a work but rather collaborates with it and helps shape its place in the world. The paratext is in need of analysis and interpretation as much as the text itself, and even...

Digital literature emphasizes its own medium, and it brings to the foreground the graphic, material aspects of language. Experiments with the new medium and with the form of language are generally presented and interpreted within a framework of the historical avant-garde or the neo-avant-garde. This article aims to take a new perspective on the eme...

The work of the succesfull Dutch author Arnon Grunberg seems to be intertextual in a postmodern way: he recycles, quotes and refers to existing stories and novels. However, the functions of this intertextuality are different in Grunbergs oeuvre than they were in postmodernism. Here I try to give a more adequate description and interpretation of int...

The work of the succesful Dutch author Arnon Grunberg seems to be intertextual in a postmodern way: he recycles, quotes and refers to existing stories and novels. However, the functions of this intertextuality are different in Grunberg's oeuvre than they were in postmodernism. Here I try to give a more adequate description and interpretation of int...