Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 28, Issue 1, 2023

This article discusses the Authors’ Protest, organised by a group of Dutch literary writers in 1962-1963 to emphasize the need for governmental support for literature, and relates this protest to the debate on literary autonomy. The article follows Gisèle Sapiro’s proposal to distinguish between autonomy as a feature of the literary field and autonomy as the institutional recognition of professional authorship. This distinction is linked to the analysis of so-called polities or value regimes, a methodology introduced by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. This methodology is a useful tool for analyzing value shifts and discussions about values in a domain such as the literary world. After a reconstruction of the wider debate about fair remuneration of authors (1955-1963), the analysis zooms in on the political as well as poetical debates about governmental support that writers were engaged in during the winter of 1962-1963. While the largest group of writers regarded government subsidies for literature as a means to gain more professional autonomy, a smaller group of writers feared that subsidies would let them lose their moral freedom. This debate was intertwined with a more fundamentally political discussion about the power that the state should exercise over the cultural field.

In this article, we argue that a new conceptual, pedagogical and didactic design is needed to foster the writing skills of Dutch high school students and to enhance their education in the Dutch language and culture. We present the first draft of such a new design, based on the needs of the various stakeholders (teachers, high school students, didactic experts) as well as the opportunities the teaching of writing skills holds out. Needs were inventoried through interviews with stakeholders and through a literature review of reports on the current state of the teaching of writing skills. Potential opportunities were identified by studying literature on the conceptual modelling of the writing process and by investigating pedagogic and didactic practices aimed at professional as well as creative writing teaching (both in international and historical contexts). Taken together, these new insights in current needs and potential opportunities resulted in a new design for teaching writing skills, as well a first proposal for a digital learning environment (http://SchrijfLab.nl) that will allow for testing of this design.