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oa Transnationaliteit peilen via mentions?
Over auteursvermeldingen en constellatietopoi in Jerzy Kochs (en J. C. Kannemeyers) Afrikaanse literatuurgeschiedenis tot 1900
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Internationale Neerlandistiek, Volume 63, Issue 1, Mar 2025, p. 38 - 56
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- 01 Mar 2025
Abstract
This contribution focuses on the practice, common in literary histories, of mentioning authors who do not immediately belong to the object of study of the literary historian in question (e.g., referring to German writers in a history of Bulgarian literature). Building on the concepts of mention (Rosengren) and constellation (Thomsen), I present and study the particular – ‘transnational’ Polish-Afrikaans – case of the first volume of Jerzy Koch’s A history of South African literature: Afrikaans literature, both on its own as in correlation to the literary history of his South African predecessor, J. C. Kannemeyer. I probe various constellation types and also introduce the notion of ‘constellation topos’, raising the question of whether such a topos indicates plagiarism. Towards the end, I use the tables compiled for this study to examine whether foreign author names alone are enough to determine the transnational nature of a literary history. In the Koch case study, this rather does not appear to be the case. This article nonetheless proves that the phenomenon of literary constellations is useful both for writers and researchers of literary histories.