oa ‘En dat vindt u vrouwelijk?’

“And you think that’s feminine?” Posture versus image in a television interview with Jacques Hamelink (1969)

In recent years, scholars in Dutch literary studies have started to pay more attention to public images of authorship, including appearances of authors on television. In order to analyze such televisual images of literary authors, one might put Jérôme Meizoz’s concept of posture into use. Arguing that this concept is too fuzzy to apply without making a terminological distinction between the process of auto-presentation (resulting into an author’s posture) and hetero-presentation (resulting into an author’s imago), the article analyzes a literary television show of the late 1960s, in which the author Jacques Hamelink is portrayed. The analysis shows both convergences and discrepancies between Hamelink’s posture and his imago, that result from both director’s choices and critical interventions by Hamelink’s interviewer, the female critic Andreas Burnier. Although such interactions between auto-presentation and hetero-presentation can be described more fruitfully if one differentiates between posture and imago, applying Meizoz’s work to literary television can never do full justice to the complex nature of televisual images of authorship.