The Singing Narrators of Fictional Lies: A Close and Distant Reading of Dutch Mendacious Songs

Abstract

The on-going process of the mass digitisation of Dutch literature during the past two decades implies an increase in the digital analysis of such resources. This situation is not particular for the Netherlands: given the growing amount of the electronic book stack worldwide, one of the core questions in the field of digital humanities revolves around how to read a million books. As ‘opposed’ to the close reading practice we are used to in literary theory, Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ focusses on a large group of texts, and the zooming out of that corpus by means of visualisations is bound to bring into view patterns that were not observable from close by. Distant reading is therefore rereading and rewriting literary history, an explaining of patterns rather than an interpreting of individual texts.

This thesis serves as a test of these close and distant reading techniques, to see if we can indeed affirm, refute or nuance some assumptions in Dutch Literary Studies using digital reading methods. Generic assumptions can function as a good set of hypotheses for this purpose, as these make out a small portion of literary history, and as their definitions are often based on a few exemplary cases rather than all specimens attributed to the genre. The case study in this thesis involves the genre of Dutch mendacious songs, a relatively small genre of which only a handful of assumptions on its definition exist. Mendacious songs contain impossibilities and a lying narrative instance, and are set in a wonderland, such as ‘Luilekkerland’: ‘’k Zag twee beren broodjes smeren’ is an example of such songs. How can we (re)define this genre by close and distant reading a small and large corpus of these songs respectively?