Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 63, Issue 1, 2025

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.

The globalised multicultural cooperation of today’s world has led to inter- and transcultural communication and intercultural management becoming part of many professions in which Dutch Studies graduates extra muros are also employed. The department of Dutch Studies at Comenius University in Bratislava has, as part of its re-accreditation process, incorporated courses in intercultural communication and intercultural management into the curriculum. In this contribution, we argue why these courses are relevant for a study of Dutch language and culture. Methodologically, the delineation of the core concepts is based on, a.o., Bourdieu’s habitus concept (1977), the definition of intercultural communication and competence according to Pinto (2000; 2007) and Van Kalsbeek (2010), and Holtbrügge and Welge’s description of intercultural management (2010), using the cultural dimensions of Hofstede and Hofstede (2005). Based on this theoretical delineation and description of aspects of intercultural communication and intercultural management in the mentioned curriculum, we argue why these topics play an important role in the development of competences necessary in professions with a cultural profile.