Doel Van begin juli tot eind december 2020 onderzoekt een klein team onder leiding van Helleke van den Braber, Geert Buelens en Laurens Ham (Universiteit Utrecht) binnen het ZonMw Covid-19-Programma ‘Wetenschap voor de praktijk’ hoe het Nederlandse boekbedrijf versterkt kan worden. In het eindrapport proberen ze een voorstel te formuleren om de veerkracht van de zwaar getroffen boekenwereld te versterken.

Aanpak In samenwerking met vertegenwoordigers van de Nederlandse auteurs, uitgeverijen, boekhandelaren, bibliotheken, leesbevorderaars, kennisinstituten en overheid brengen ze de impact van de coronacrisis in kaart. Centrale vragen in het onderzoek zijn: welke steunmaatregelen en burgerinitiatieven hebben welk effect gehad? Welke vormen van samenwerking zouden de sector kunnen versterken?

Link naar de ZonMW projectpagina

Link naar het onderzoeksrapport, verschenen op 17 mei 2021 

• Tessa van de Warenburg MA
• Camilla Pargentino
• prof. dr. Geert Buelens
• prof. dr. Helleke van den Braber

Bringing together Cultural Policy Studies, Literary Studies, field theory, and posture theory for the first time, this project explores the vital role of authors in shaping Dutch literary policies since the 1960s. A focus on literature is in itself new to Cultural Policy Studies, but more importantly this project introduces a bottom-up approach to policy. This approach leads to a better understanding of the agency of individuals in policy systems they are subject to.

By analysing many unrevealed sources (such as grant applications, interviews, opinion articles and novels about policies), this project investigates how authors attempted to maximise their influence in the ever changing cultural-political climate. The project analyses both the acts and texts authors used, and the attitudes they developed in their policymaking role.

Dutch literary policy is a fruitful case study for such a bottom-up approach. Firstly, DFL assumes an intermediary position between the literary field and the political field. Therefore, it has given authors many opportunities to influence policies via advisory boards. Secondly, DFL is among the world’s oldest cultural policy foundations, which enables a study of authors’ formative policymaking role over an extensive period of time.

My long-term interpretation not only leads to new insights in Dutch authorial and literary history. The bottom-up perspective also helps us to understand how important contributions of individuals are to a flourishing policy climate in general. This idea is more urgent than ever, now that European public sectors are constantly reorganised from above.

The concept of autonomy is a frequently recuring concept in research on Western literature since 1800. Clearly, this concept is used te refer to what is considered an essential characteristic of modern literature, namely the ambivalent relationship between literature and society. However, it is also clear that this concept represents a range of different issues: sometimes it refers to the autonomy of a work, sometimes to that of the author, and at other times it refers to the autonomy of the literary domain in its social context. Moreover, autonomy is appraised in a variety of ways: autonomy is frequently seens as the liberation of literature, which can only flourish once it has attained particularity, but sometimes autonomy is taken to symbolize the declining function of literature. In the historiography of modern literature, the discussion about autonomy is fundamental. Its is therefore necessary to provide an analysis and explanation of the concept. In this project, the discussion of autonomy will  be placed in a broader context by approaching it as a multi-dimensional concept consisting of three distinct dimensions: the social 'statute' of modern literature, the modern writer as a prototypical subject and the particularity of the aesthetic.

• dr. Wilbert Smulders
• dr. Frans Ruiter