Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 23, Issue 1, 2018

Abstract ‘I Cannot Recover from an Illness I Do Not Know’. Depression and Intertextuality in Kikker gaat fietsen (2008) by Maarten van Buuren The last two decades have witnessed the growth and popularity of autobiographical texts featuring clinical depression in which a first person narrator describes and interprets the experience of mental illness. Existing studies have mainly focused on how these illness narratives can infor Read More

Abstract A Walking Anomaly: Renate Dorrestein’s Heden ik (1993), ME/CFS, and the indeterminacy of autopathography Literary memoirs of illness are often invoked as valuable sources of medical and psychological insight. The epistemological value of such ‘autopathographies’, however, remains a matter of dispute in extant research: do these text adequately convey patients’ experiences, or are they literary, artificial con Read More

Abstract Reading Autie-Biographically: The Field of Tensions between Language, Narrativity and Autism Within the current disability memoir boom, the popularity of autism narratives makes it almost impossible to keep up with its publication flow. This implies that there is a growing market for those stories, and indeed, several publishing companies are even specialized in these memoirs. However, when autism memoirs – also c Read More

Abstract For and By Madmen: the Gekkenkrant as a discursive practice The Gekkenkrant, an anti-psychiatry zine published between 1973 and 1981, takes up an important position in the history of Dutch psychiatry. The Gekkenkrant is to be situated at the intersection of the formal experiments in both Dutch and international avant-garde literature on the one hand and the anti-psychiatric movements from the 1960s and 1970s on t Read More