email: Jesseka.Batteau@let.uu.nl
project: ‘Collective memory, literary practice and the religious past 1945-2005: The work and reputation of Dutch authors and the collective remembrance of the Christian past in the Netherlands’ (PhD project)
Supervisors: Prof. Ann Rigney, dr. Frans Ruiter, dr. Wilbert Smulders

Jesseka Batteau is Phd-researcher at the Research Institute for History and Culture at Utrecht University. Having studied Literary Theory and History, she wrote her MA thesis on the theoretical claims concerning the ethical effects of metafiction. Her current research interest is in the relation between literature and society, and more specifically, the manner in which authors and their work function as icons within culture. She started her project in August 2006. Her main supervisor is prof. dr. Ann Rigney and she is further supervised by Dr. Wilbert Smulders and Dr. Frans Ruiter.

Collective memory, literary practice and the religious past 1945-2005: The work and reputation of Dutch authors and the collective remembrance of the Christian past in the Netherlands

Central to my project is the complex relationship between literary culture (of writers, readers, critics, literary prizes and exhibitions, etc.) and the cultural remembrance of the Christian past in the Netherlands from 1945 onwards. I am starting from the assumption that literary authors – that is, their work and reputation – can fulfil a particular role in the construction and survival of shared memory. In my project I will be focussing on the way in which several Dutch authors (their literary work ánd public image) have functioned in the ever-changing public reflection on religion and the religious past. My hypothesis is that some of these authors have become iconic for several narrowly associated subjects, representing not only a particular corpus of texts but also a certain stance vice versa ‘traditional religiosity’ as well as a certain era in the Dutch cultural and religious past.

I distinguish between two modes in which the collective remembrance of the religious past has been influenced by the authors in question. The first ‘type’ refers to those authors writing about their own religious background (for example, Maarten ‘t Hart), an autobiographical past that has come to represent a culturally shared past. The second mode encompasses those authors who have refigured the ‘traditional’ modes of religious remembrance in their work and public performances (for example, Gerard Reve), at one and the same time ‘remembering’ the Christian tradition and envisioning new forms of dealing with the Christian heritage of churches, narratives, symbols and rituals.