Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde - Volume 142, Nummer 1, 2026

Much ink has been spilled over the question how the pronoun u ‘you’ came to be used as a polite form of address in subject function in the history of Dutch, and the role epistolary forms of address played in it. What has so far escaped attention is the form that verbal agreement takes with u. In present-day Dutch, there is variation in verbs that have distinct second and third person forms. The current paper traces the diachronic development of this variation in a corpus of letters from the 17^th and 18^th centuries and argues that the present-day variation is the result of top-down and bottom-up tendencies: the downward spread of upper class (written) forms of address requiring third person agreement and the initial use of the position-dependent agreement system of gij, and analogical pressure against it, from below.

This article starts from the hypothesis that destabilizing a coherent fictional world constitutes a core strategy within the ideological project of totaalproza authors. It examines how Lidy van Marissing, one of these authors, employs narrative space in her debut novel Ontbinding (1972) as a means of expressing literary and political engagement. Drawing on Zoran’s model of narrative space and philosophical concepts such as Foucault’s heterotopia and Augé’s non-place, the analysis demonstrates how Ontbinding organizes its narrative world around binary oppositions – inside/outside, private/public, personal/anonymous – that are systematically undermined. This subversion generates political awareness not only among the novel’s characters, but also within the reader, who is actively engaged through the textual rendering of narrative space in the montage novel. In Ontbinding, the use of space functions not merely as a reflection of Van Marissing’s social vision, but as an invitation to critically interrogate one’s own reality.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Bourdieusian field theory and its underlying conceptual framework. This renewed attention appears to be driven largely by the radical transformation of the literary field over the last few decades, a shift that catalysed by globalisation and digitalisation. While Bourdieu’s work acknowledges socio-historical flux, sociological literary scholarship often persists in treating the field as a closed structure. This article challenges that rigidity. By employing the notion of ‘translation’, it seeks to expand the (infra)structural understanding of the literary field while simultaneously interrogating its systemic boundaries. Ultimately, this article aims to provide deeper insight into the internal dynamics of the literary field and to rehabilitate the role of translation within that space.