Odile Heynders, born in Breda, the Netherlands, in 1961. Ph.D. from Tilburg University. Assistant Professor of Theory and History of Literature at Tilburg University.
Fellow (1 September 1997 – 30 June 1998)
During the first two months of my stay at NIAS, I finished a study on Paul Rodenko (1920-1976), a famous Dutch critic in the 1950s. From November 1997 till June 1998, I wrote seven chapters of a book on twentieth-century Dutch poetry in European context (eleven chapters are planned). In each chapter a specific aspect of this poetry is illustrated by the work of different poets: modernism (Joseph Brodsky and M. Nijhoff), baroque (R.M. Rilke and Maurice Gilliams), hermetic poetry (Hans Faverey and Paul Celan), sentimentalism (Willem de Mérode and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning), pictoral poetry (Paul van Ostaijen, S. Vestdijk, W. H. Auden and Pierre Kemp), de-personalisation (Georg Trakl, Gerrit Achterberg, F. Pessoa), autobiographical poetry (Eva Gerlach, Elisabeth Eybers, Sylvia Plath, Ed Hoornik, Guillaume van der Graft). Differences and similarities in the oeuvres of the poets are demonstrated by the concept of ‘correspondency’. This is a notion taken from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, which shows that meaning can be transposed from one level (poem) to another.
My aim was to write a ‘history’ of Dutch poetry — not by following traditional linear concepts, but by taking a more multifaceted point of view. I hope to finish the book in the spring of 1999.