Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde

J.H. de Roder

Neerlandistiek van Nu en Straks. Voor de poëtische ervaring

Abstract -- In this essay I want to argue that the study of Dutch literature has largely paralysed our experience of poetry. The obvious reason for the paralysis is that the complexity of the poetic experience seems too much to handle. Still, it is this primary experience of poetry that attracts us to poetry in the first place and makes us return to it over and over again. It is perhaps first and foremost the primacy of meaning in theory of poetry combined with an adherence to a basically nineteenth-century conception of semantics that facilitated the academic abolishment of poetic experience. Only if we overcome our disciplinary biases and allow interdisciplinary excursions in the study of poetry, an experienced-based approach to poetry is possible.

TNTL 120-4 (december 2004), 325-339