Tracing paradigms one hundred years of neophilologus

The beginnings of the journal lie in the Netherlands, more precisely, in Amsterdam, and for the greater part of the journal’s existence, the editorial board has always consisted of Dutch

Tracing Paradigms: One Hundred Years

Tracing Paradigms: One Hundred Years

of Neophilologus

Rolf H Bremmer Jr • Thijs Porck Frans Ruiter • Usha Wilbers

Editors

Tracing Paradigms:

One Hundred Years of

Neophilologus

ISBN 978-3-319-33583-4 ISBN 978-3-319-33585-8 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33585-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016953487

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

This work is subject to copyright All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use

The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors

or omissions that may have been made

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The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland

Editors

Rolf H Bremmer Jr

Leiden University Centre

for the Arts in Society

English Department Radboud University Nijmegen , The Netherlands

“For the Time Being, Things Will Remain as They Are.”

A Hundred Years of Neophilologus 9 Sjaak Onderdelinden

Overview of One Hundred Years of Editors of Neophilologus 29 Thijs Porck

Part II Literary Theory

Erasmus’ Praise of Folly : Rivalry and Madness 35

J M Coetzee (reprinted from Neophilologus 76 [1992], 1–18)

In Praise of the Little Phallus: On J M Coetzee’s

Contribution to Neophilologus 53 Frans Ruiter

Part III French

Le Nouveau Recueil Complet Des Fabliaux (NRCF) 63

Nico van den Boogaard (reprinted from Neophilologus 61 [1977], 333–345)

Le Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux : à propos d’un

article de Nico van den Boogaard dans Neophilologus 79 Roberto Crespo

The Term “emblème” in Sixteenth-century France 81

Daniel Russell (reprinted from Neophilologus 59 [1975], 337–351)

L’émergence des études sur l’emblème français: à propos d’un

article de Daniel Russell dans Neophilologus 95 Paul J Smith

Part IV Spanish

Classical Tragedy and Cervantes’ La Numancia 105

Frederick A de Armas (reprinted from Neophilologus 58 [1974], 34–40)

La Numancia within Structural Patterns of Sixteenth-century

Spanish Tragedy 113

Edward H Friedman (reprinted from Neophilologus 61 [1977], 74–89)

La Numancia de Cervantes en Neophilologus Sobre sendas

contribuciones de Armas y de Friedman 129

Rina Walthaus

La estética en Ortega 137

José Correa Camiroaga (reprinted from Neophilologus 66 [1982], 559–568)

Reading the Frame: Signalling Politics in Nada 147

Fenny Ebels (reprinted from Neophilologus 93 [2009], 619–632)

Neophilologus y la literatura española e hispanoamericana

posterior a 1800 Sobre sendas contribuciones de Correa

Camiroaga y de Ebels 163

Henk Oostendorp

Part V German

Versuch eines Bildungsgangs des Simplicissimusdichters 171

J H Scholte (reprinted from Neophilologus 7 [1922], 190–207)

Die Anfänge der wissenschaftlichen Grimmelshausen-Forschung

Zum Beitrag von Jan Hendrik Scholte in Neophilologus 189

Jef Jacobs

Der deutsche Briefroman Zum Problem der Polyperspektive

im Epischen 199

Karl Robert Mandelkow (reprinted from Neophilologus 44 [1960], 200–207)

Die Mädchen aus der Feenwelt – Bemerkungen zu Liebe

und Prostitution mit Bezügen zu Raimund, Schnitzler

und Horvath 207

W G Sebald (reprinted from Neophilologus 67 [1983], 109–117)

Zwei Aufsätze—zwei Extreme Zu den Beiträgen von

Karl Robert Mandelkow und W G Sebald in Neophilologus 217

Sjaak Onderdelinden

Contents

Part VI English

Beowulf and Literary Criticism 231

J C van Meurs (reprinted from Neophilologus 39 [1955], 114–130)

Tolkien and Beowulf : On J C van Meurs’s Contribution

to Neophilologus 247

Rolf H Bremmer Jr

Ernest Hemingway and The Dial 255

Nicholas Joost (reprinted from Neophilologus 52 [1968], 180–190, 304–313)

Periodical Studies avant la lettre : On Nicholas Joost’s

Contribution to Neophilologus 275

Usha Wilbers

Contents

Contributors

Rolf H Bremmer Jr Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society , Leiden University , Leiden , The Netherlands

*José Correa Camiroaga University of Antwerp , Antwerp , Belgium

*J M Coetzee University of Cape Town , Cape Town , South Africa

Roberto Crespo Department of Humanities , University of Pavia , Pavia , Italy

*Frederick A de Armas Louisiana State University , Baton Rouge , LA , USA

*Fenny Ebels Willem Lodewijk Gymnasium, Groningen , The Netherlands

*Edward H Friedman Kalamazoo College , Kalamazoo , MI , USA

Jef Jacobs Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society , Leiden University , Leiden , The Netherlands

*Nicholas Joost Southern Illinois University , Carbondale , IL , USA

*Karl Robert Mandelkow University of Hamburg, Hamburg , Germany

Sjaak Onderdelinden Faculty of Humanities , Leiden University , Leiden , The Netherlands

Henk Oostendorp Faculty of Arts , University of Groningen , Groningen , The Netherlands

Thijs Porck Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society , Leiden University , Leiden , The Netherlands

Frans Ruiter Research Institute for Cultural Inquiry , Utrecht University , Utrecht , The Netherlands

Asterisks indicate the reprinted articles; the authors’ affi liations refer to the time of the original publication

*Daniel Russell University of Pittsburgh , Pittsburgh , PA , USA

*J H Scholte Municipal University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam , The Netherlands

*W G Sebald The University of East Anglia , Norwich , UK

Paul J Smith Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society , Leiden University , Leiden , The Netherlands

*Nico van den Boogaard University of Amsterdam , Amsterdam , The Netherlands

*J C van Meurs Municipal University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam , The Netherlands

Rina Walthaus Faculty of Arts , University of Groningen , Groningen , The Netherlands

Usha Wilbers English Department , Radboud University , Nijmegen , The Netherlands

Contributors

Part I

General

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

R H Bremmer Jr et al (eds.), Tracing Paradigms: One Hundred Years of

Neophilologus, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33585-8_1

A Centenary of Neophilologus : Retrospect

and Prospect

Rolf H Bremmer Jr

One hundred years of Neophilologus is a momentous achievement and therefore

certainly a jubilee that deserves to be celebrated One hundred volumes line up that together have spawned several thousands of articles and, until 1972, an equal num-ber of book reviews, on a wide and sometimes bewildering range of subjects, authored by scholars from all over the world Little did the founding fathers—all of

them were men, but luckily, and rightly so, times have changed—of Neophilologus

imagine such a glorious career for their brainchild

The beginnings of the journal lie in the Netherlands, more precisely, in Amsterdam, and for the greater part of the journal’s existence, the editorial board has always consisted of Dutch scholars or of foreign scholars who held a position at

a Dutch university Even though the contributions in the early volumes were derantly submitted by Dutch men and Dutch women (the fi rst issue included a long

prepon-and perceptive review by Dr Cornelia Serrurier, privaatdocent of French literature

at the University of Leiden), the journal’s scope nonetheless was directed outwards,

to Western Europe initially but eventually to the world at large, right from the fi rst issue Even so, the journal’s long and programmatic subtitle betrayed its Dutch basis: “Driemaandelijks tijdschrift voor de wetenschappelijke beoefening van levende vreemde talen en van hun letterkunde” (Three-monthly journal for the scholarly study of living foreign languages and of their literatures) When, after four years, the board was extended with two classical scholars, the title was expanded accordingly: “en voor de studie van de klassieke talen in hun verband met de moderne” (and for the study of the classical languages in their relation with the modern ones) Inside the fi rst issue, however, the reader would look in vain for articles and reviews in Dutch: all the contributions were written in a modern lan-guage other than Dutch, whether English, German or French Occasionally, the title

of a rubric reveals that the editors assumed their initial readership to consist

R H Bremmer Jr ( * )

Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society , Leiden University , Leiden , The Netherlands e-mail: r.h.bremmer@hum.leidenuniv.nl

pally of fellow- countrymen and -women: “Aankondigingen van eigen werk” (Notices of [one’s] own work)—that is, a short announcement of a recent publica-tion of one of the journal’s editors, written by the author himself

Perusal of the fi rst volume is revealing in other respects, too, for it shows how much the journal has changed its character over the past century As Sjaak Onderdelinden explains in his historiographical evaluation in this volume,

Neophilologus was originally intended as a publication platform for a group of

mainly Amsterdam professors Yet, at the same time, the journal also served as a source of information for the increasing number of people in the Netherlands who had studied a modern language The possibility of creating a university chair in any

of the modern languages had been enabled by law only in 1875, and it had taken some time before universities realized the potential of this opportunity By way of example, Groningen was the fi rst to appoint a professor of English language and literature, in 1885, while Leiden was the last to found such a chair, in 1950 Most of

the students of foreign languages had found a position as teachers at gymnasia and

other advanced institutes of secondary education that proliferated throughout the

country Research into the disciplines covered by Neophilologus had not yet become

the prerogative of professional academics as it is today, and many teachers at Dutch secondary schools were writing their doctoral dissertations at home in their spare time in order to acquire the title that would give them prestige among their col-leagues and, no less important, an increment in salary and the prospect of becoming

the rector of their school The editors tried to accommodate for this considerable

part of their readership by including reviews of recent books and, additionally, by presenting regular surveys of the contents of related national and international jour-nals and a list of books received for review

Not only was it the (self-imposed) duty of the editors to fi ll the pages of their journal, they were also given the task of acquiring copy for their respective fi elds of study Usually, potential contributors were found amongst their students who were encouraged to revise their MA-thesis for publication Yet, it did not take long before scholars from abroad discovered a new possibility for publication The fi rst issue of volume two contains two international contributions The fi rst concerned a lengthy discussion of the Second German Sound-shift by the Berlin scholar Sigmund Feist, who was to acquire lasting fame by writing a still frequently consulted etymological dictionary of the Gothic language The other article was authored by the Paris scholar Alfred Jeanroy, a member of the prestigious “Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres,” founded in 1663 Jeanroy was already an established expert in

medieval lyrical poetry, especially as composed by the troubadours in France, but

also in the compositions of the trobadores on the Iberian peninsula and the

Minnesänger in Germany The two articles at the same time aptly illustrate the

breadth of the journal’s grand scope: Feist’s discussion is highly linguistic, probing the German language from a diachronic perspective, as was very much the fashion then Jeanroy’s essay, on the other hand, takes a historical-literary approach and tries to formulate a theoretical framework within which the medieval lyrical poetry can be assessed Both scholars are representative for the editorial policy that

Neophilologus would take in the course of its centennial existence and which has

R H Bremmer Jr

proven to be so conducive to its longevity Volume after volume contains a wide range of articles, some dealing with fi nicky philological detail, others concerned with high-fl ying theoretical problems

One of the constant factors in its history is the journal’s name: Neophilologus

Conspicuous in particular is the Latin in which it was cast Who invented the title is not known, but the idea to have it include the word ‘philologus’ was nothing less

than an ambitious claim There was already a journal called Philologus , founded in

1846 with the subtitle: ‘Zeitschrift für antike Literatur und ihr Nachleben.’ Clearly,

Neophilologus was to do in the fi eld of the modern languages what had given Philologus its highly esteemed reputation in the fi eld of Classical studies ‘Philology’

at the time of the foundation of our journal was a generic denominator for a pline that had developed in the course of the nineteenth century as a result of the great discoveries made in the fi eld of Indo-European comparative linguistics Not only did it include the study of a language back to its historic and even pre-historic (reconstructed) roots (Jacob Grimm), but it also covered the practice of textual criti-cism (Karl Lachmann) and the study of mythology and literature, especially the older forms of literature, such as sagas, fables, legend and riddles (again Grimm)

disci-Numerous other journals had adopted the term in their title, including Zeitschrift für

deutsche Philologie (1868, Germany), Arkiv för nordisk fi lologi (1882, Norway),

Journal of Germanic Philology (1897, USA; later renamed as Journal of English

and Germanic Philology ), Neuphilologische Mitteilungen (1899, Finland) and

Revista de Filología Española (1914) The term remained en vogue as a periodical’s identifi er for some time after the foundation of Neophilologus , witness such titles as Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire (1922, Belgium), Studia Neophilologica (1927, Sweden), and, a very recent addition to this venerable company, Filologia

germanica (2009, Italy) Especially in the 1950s and 1960s, however, the term

‘phi-lology’ as a designator of a literary and/or linguistics studies became discredited, since for many students of languages and literatures it smacked too much of jug-gling with bone-dry sound-laws and nit-picking at insignifi cant textual details Its resilience, nonetheless, showed with the arrival of the New Philology, as propagated

in a special issue of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies (vol 65.1) in 1990

Focussing especially on the manuscript text and how to edit it, followers of the New Philology defended their more or less traditional methodology against ideas that were grounded in Foucault’s deconstructive approach

The vicissitudes of the once popular discipline of philology are also refl ected in the subtitle of our journal In order to meet the ever increasing international input, the editors (or perhaps the publisher), at the occasion of the journal’s fi ftieth birth-day, in 1966, decided to substitute the Dutch subtitle for an English one: ‘A quar-terly devoted to the study of the modern languages and their literatures, and the classical languages in so far as they bear upon the former’ As a matter of fact, the last contribution in Dutch had appeared in 1964 and in their editorial for the fi ftieth volume the editors wrote that ‘Only in exceptional cases are reviews written in Dutch accepted for publication.’

In a later modifi cation of the editorial policy, in 1968, the readers were told that

‘The normal languages of publication are English, French, German, Italian and

A Centenary of Neophilologus: Retrospect and Prospect

Spanish, but articles in other languages may also be submitted for considerations by the Editorial Board.’ In as far as I have been able to ascertain, the Board has never needed to consider such a request Indeed, increasingly articles were written in English, also when the object of study was written in another language, such as German, French or Spanish In 1968, too, it was decided to adapt the subtitle to a development in scholarly character that had gradually taken place: ‘An international journal devoted to the study of modern and mediaeval language and literature, including general linguistics, literary theory and comparative literature.’ First of all, the addition of ‘international’ acknowledged the retreat of the prominent position that Dutch scholars once held Furthermore, it was no longer clear to the mind of the editors that the ‘modern’ in ‘modern languages’ contrasted them to the Classical languages Apparently, the then editors conceived of ‘modern’ as ‘of recent times’ and, in order to disambiguate the term, ‘mediaeval’ was added Finally, the explicit inclusion of ‘general linguistics, literary theory and comparative literature,’ all recently young branches in the fi eld, was in all likelihood intended to make overtly clear to potential new contributors and readers alike that the journal’s editorial pol-icy was abreast of the latest scholarly trends and not as stuffy as the philology to which the title ‘Neophilologus’ alluded However, in 1972, when the reformist spirit

of the late’sixties had somewhat subsided, the subtitle was reduced to a more est self-description: ‘An international journal of modern and mediaeval language and literature,’ and that is what the journal still claims to be

In the last decade or two, a silent development in the wider world of scholarly periodicals that lay beyond the editors’ sphere of infl uence has further affected the nature of Neophilologus , especially when seen against the backdrop of its

Werdegang The journal’s readership that originally constituted of mainly Dutch

subscribers had slowly but steadily acquired international dimensions More and more libraries abroad were making the journal available to their readers According

to the editorial of 1966, celebrating the journal’s fi ftieth anniversary, “ Neophilologus

established itself in the inter-war years as an organ of intercommunication between the Netherlands Universities and the rest of the world of learning.” With the rising professionalization of academia, the number of private subscribers decreased accordingly and intercommunication with Dutch universities as one of the journal’s aims receded into the background For many years the number of subscriptions remained stable at about 700 However, since the entire run of the journal was digi-tized and made available to the world at large on the Internet, in 1997, the nature of the journal’s readership has dramatically altered, at least to the extent that irrespec-tive of place, anyone was able from that moment onwards to access the journal and download an article for a (relatively) modest price, instead of photocopying it in a library This new reality also implied—as it still does—that fewer people will browse through the latest issue of the journal, as was possible when it was lying on the open library shelves and inviting to be picked up and perused for interesting contributions So, in addition to institutional subscriptions and users—both profes-sional academics and students—associated with these, both in hard copy and in digital format, the journal is increasingly depending for its existence on stray visi-tors on the Internet The journal’s vitality is no longer measured in number of

R H Bremmer Jr

subscriptions but in number of article downloads—for 2014 this was 45,147 times, much to the publisher’s content and consequently that of the editorial board, I shall hasten to add

A diverse and, in many respects, evasive readership may seem diffi cult to cater for Nonetheless, judging by the number of submissions landing on the managing

editor’s virtual desk, scholars in general do appreciate Neophilologus ’s diversity In

the course of the journal’s history a certain preference has grown in the various disciplines For example, for English the focus is directed on Old and Middle English: at least three-quarters of the submissions fall within this category For

French, Neophilologus proves to be attractive especially for medieval and twentieth-

century studies, while for Spanish there is a healthy mix across the whole spectre of Spanish and Latin American literature The occasional Italian contributions, on the other hand, are confi ned mainly to the Middle Ages, whereas German again attracts contributors on topics ranging from the Middle Ages to contemporary literature Other modern languages, including (Middle) Dutch and Old Norse/Scandinavian, feature less frequently in the pages of our journal; the last article on (Old) Frisian dates from 2001

The production of Neophilologus has been enabled through a range of

publish-ers For many years J B Wolters in Groningen was responsible for the unbroken line of four issues per year, until in the mid-sixties the merger virus started to spread and Wolters joined forces with another Groningen educative publisher, P Noordhoff,

in 1968 This combination was taken over by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1987, which itself, fi nally, merged, at least partly, with the German academic publisher Springer Verlag in 2004, now the second biggest publisher of academic journals and books in the world Fortunately, notwithstanding these many changes in publishing companies, the editorial independence has remained unchanged As has been the tradition for so many years, the published contents have always been diligently assessed by members of the editorial board and a range of anonymous referees Especially, since the latter rarely receive any conspicuous credits in the journal’s pages, their input in terms of both time and critical thinking is expressly mentioned here with gratitude Our existence as a journal also depends, of course, on the schol-

ars who submit the fruit of their hard work to Neophilologus We would like to

acknowledge the efforts of all those thousands of authors who saw their articles published and we equally acknowledge the recognition from those who did submit but whose work we were unable to accommodate, not because they were lacking in quality but because other submissions were better Finally, a word of thanks is extended to our readers, the majority of whom remain unknown to us, but whose consultation and digestion of the contents of our journal is precisely what has given

us, editors past and present, the energy to carry on with our task, no matter how burdensome it sometimes may be, and face the future of Neophilologus with

confi dence

A Centenary of Neophilologus: Retrospect and Prospect

It is only proper for a journal that celebrates its centenary anniversary to mark this event with appropriate attention In consultation with the publisher, it was decided

to do so with a special book Of course, such a book cannot fail to be furnished with

an introduction, an anecdotal evaluation of Neophilologus ’ history and a survey of

all the editors up to the present day In addition, the Board also desired to showcase

a profi le of the journal by publishing a number of pivotal contributions To this end, the editors of this celebratory volume asked past and present members of the jour-nal’s editorial board to select one or two articles that in their opinion not only rep-resented their fi eld in a conspicuous way but also played a role in the subsequent scholarship Moreover, the contributors were requested to write a commentary in which they accounted for their particular choice by critically placing the article in context Such a set-up, it was deemed, would provide an added value and was to be preferred over a mere anthology of remarkable contributions It is hoped that these

highlights from Neophilologus ’ rich past, provided with comments from the

pres-ent, will contribute to the paradigms for its future

On behalf of the members of the editorial board and the managing editor,

Rolf H Bremmer Jr, Editor-in-chief

R H Bremmer Jr

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

R H Bremmer Jr et al (eds.), Tracing Paradigms: One Hundred Years of

Neophilologus, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33585-8_2

“For the Time Being, Things Will Remain

as They Are.” A Hundred Years

of Neophilologus

Sjaak Onderdelinden

It is with some hesitation that I assume the task to write something about the

cente-narian history of Neophilologus After all, scholarly journals, certainly when they

take linguistics and literary studies as their objects of interest, tend to be the most boring publications one can possibly imagine Sensational articles are the preroga-tive of medical or science journals And even then perhaps only the odd publication

is sensational, not the journal itself For periodicals of a linguistic or literary- theoretical nature, the main criterion rather is: solidity—and this is hardly a basis for appetizing historiography

For Neophilologus an additional factor is that members of the editorial board

frequently remained in function for many years or even several decades—the bership was (and is) an excellent opportunity to fi ll up the time or at least part of one’s retirement

It comes hardly as a surprise, therefore, that a journal of the kind of Neophilologus

has been carried for a considerable part by conservatism Whatever the board had once decided was considered good This motto has infl uenced the formulation of the journal’s scholarly principles, its establishment of the quality criteria and the com-position of the editorial board itself I was not at all surprised, therefore, to read in the minutes of March 1929, concerning an imminent revision of the policy with regards to book reviews, a conclusion of undoubtedly heated editorial discussions in which a change was rejected with the sentence: “For the time being, things will remain as they are.” 1 Despite the willingness to change as expressed in the opening words, the basic attitude is clear: no unnecessary changes of direction

But alas, or rather: fortunately, the situation is not as it seems The same minutes show all too clearly that changes were taking place constantly Indeed, the minutes, touchingly handwritten in standard school exercise-books, are the main source of

1 “Voorloopig blijft het zoo als het is.”

S Onderdelinden ( * )

Faculty of Humanities , Leiden University , Leiden , The Netherlands

e-mail: S.Onderlinden@planet.nl

information for anyone who wants or has to busy themselves with the history of

Neophilologus This limitation carries with it the diffi culty of eclecticism and

super-fi ciality Only and exclusively the super-fi nal results of the deliberations are worth their while for the secretary to include in his minutes, so that much of the editorial din, if any, will forever remain hidden, purged by the sensible self-censure of the minutes taker Be that as it may, not much remains of the fervently aspired ideal of journal- political conservatism Changes galore The journal changed publisher several times The participating literatures and cultures changed: initially, the editors quar-relled about the place of the (Neo-) Classical works; much later, they were con-fronted with the sharp rise of scholarly interest in Spanish and the cultures of Latin

America In the beginning, Neophilologus was heavily Netherlands-oriented,

con-cerning both contributing scholars and the language used for publication These Dutch elements gradually diminished and eventually disappeared completely, at least as far as choice of subject and language is concerned Still, as a matter of course, space remains reserved for Dutch scholars, although the many and heavy rounds of downsizing at Dutch universities have not exercised a positive effect on the number of contributions from the Low Countries The language used for publi-

cation increasingly is the lingua franca of modern times, English The palette of

submitting scholars exhibits—this too in line with the Zeitgeist —a fi rm

internationalization

As a last example of historical turbulences which could not leave to affect

Neophilologus, two World Wars must be mentioned The journal was founded

dur-ing the Great War and survived World War II I shall return to this point, but for now what matters is the observation that little came of the aspired conservatism Even if the editorial board did not want to change internally, there were external factors that forced to bring about transformations The standpoint of boring continuity is con-stantly being corrected by new developments The common thread running through

the history of a century of Neophilologus is therefore not only conservatism: it is the

constant interplay of tradition and innovation

The Foundation

Although the publication of the fi rst volume in 1916 is commonly accepted as

Neophilologus ’ moment of birth, its conception took place several months earlier

On 15 February 1915, fi ve professors convened in the Academy Building in Amsterdam They were Professors Salverda de Grave, Scholte, Sneyders de Vogel and Swaen, together with Dr Gallas, who right from the start was designated as the editorial secretary and who also took care of the minutes neatly penned in a school exercise-book Professor Frantzen, also an intended editor, was prevented from attending that afternoon, but appears to have been completely introduced, for “he

S Onderdelinden

had given his opinion on various matters to Dr Scholte.” 2 Such a detail is indicative

of a careful preparation, perhaps reaching back to 1914

The gentlemen apparently knew precisely what they wanted, so that the secretary immediately after having recorded the list of names, wrote down: “Their aim is to realize the foundation of a journal for the scholarly study of the modern languages and their literatures.” 3 It is an aim and a declaration of policy at the same time It would of course have been possible to say more For example, the neutral Netherlands

is the topographical centre in the Great War, but no reference is made to it ever, neither in the minutes nor in the fi rst issues Only when the thirtieth and fi ftieth anniversaries of the journal give occasion, the rather remarkable time of foundation

whatso-is being recalled Not, however, in 1915, since any form whatso-is lacking of an ideological

or humanitarian motivation and/or motivation for the foundation of a philological journal in times of war What is striking in the early minutes is not only the absence

of high-pitched thoughts but also the total hegemony of a quality in which many a Dutchman takes pride as a typical, national trait of character: pragmatism

This attitude explains why a whole list of practical agreements begins as follows: the journal will “for the time being, appear once every three months at the least” 4 —after a hundred years this is still the case The strictly scholarly character must be warranted by avoiding pedagogical contributions: “Articles on pedagogy will be considered for publication only in the second place and even then only if they are scholarly in nature.” 5 As could be expected from members of a consensus society—and the Netherlands, whether rightly or wrongly, counted for one—is the choice against a journal as a platform for polemics: “In its columns, no place will be made for polemics; only a brief rejoinder on a point of criticism, if any, will be allowed.” 6 The name of the journal is established as “ Neo-Philologus ”, with a soon- forgotten, in any case abolished, hyphen Mention is made of three sections, French, German, and English, but “articles on other modern languages, such as Norwegian and Italian, will certainly be welcome.” 7 Furthermore, the secretary’s role is described (a unity of font is desired) and each member of the editorial board com-mits himself to acquire “12 to 15 Dutch philologists for each section” as potential contributors 8

A brainstorm about the journal’s contents yielded the following: “as envisaged

by the board,” 9 the journal will contain “(a) Original essays, which will often treat

2 “dat hij zijn mening over verschillende punten aan den Hr Scholte had medegedeeld.”

3 “Hun doel is tot oprichting te geraken van een tijdschrift voor de wetenschappelijke beoefening der moderne talen en haar letterkunden.”

4 “voorloopig altans, ééns in de drie maanden verschijnen.”

5 “Artikelen over pedagogiek zullen slechts in de tweede plaats voor plaatsing in aanmerking komen en alleen indien ze van wetenschappelijke aard zijn.”

6 “In zijn kolommen zal geen polemiek gevoerd worden; slechts een kort antwoord op een kritiek zal eventueel opgenomen worden.”

7 “artikelen over andere moderne talen, als Noors en Italiaans, zullen welkom zijn.”

8 “12 à 15 Hollandse fi lologen voor iedere sectie.”

9 “naar de redactie zich voorstelt.”

A Hundred Years of Neophilologus

matters of detail (b) Articles of a more general nature, presenting critical surveys of this or that part of a fi eld.” 10 The fact that matters of detail precede surveys is prob-ably speaking volumes Moreover, reviews of books, especially “studies that offer new insights, should not be missing Should the publisher in question be unwilling

to send a copy of the book to the editorial board, the latter will purchase the book at their own expense.” 11 The board’s willingness to buy books for reviewing strikes as most remarkable

Equally remarkable is the role assigned to the Dutch language Even though Dutch language and literature was not included in the palette of subjects, the board nonetheless included Dutch as one of the languages suitable for publications, along with German, English, French, and Italian There was a reason for this decision, of course First and foremost, this was to be a Dutch journal: “Although the journal is mainly founded to publish the scholarly works of Dutch philologists, the editorial board will on occasion try to include articles by foreign scholars.” 12 The subclause

describes the main matter: Neophilologus wished to create a forum of publication

for Dutch scholars and reserve it for the same As a consequence, a submission in

1918 by the then still somewhat unknown Austrian germanist and romanist Leo Spitzer with the interesting title “Die groteske Sprachkunst Christian Morgensterns”

is sternly rejected with the following motivation: “It should be remembered once more that our journal should preserve its national character, unless truly outstanding foreigners wish to cooperate.” 13 Apparently, Spitzer had not reached that status yet Spitzer’s case is illustrative of the policy at that time, which was aimed at giving the journal a mostly Dutch outlook Moreover, since the editors themselves formed the

crème de la crème of Dutch philology, a conclusion is easily drawn: they did it for

themselves This conclusion is confi rmed by the tables of contents of the early years

of Neophilologus : each member of the editorial board is represented with at least ten

articles Matters have changed The attempts of the editorial board are now much more aimed at on occasion publishing a Dutch article, rather than the reverse Moreover, that Dutch article will always be from a third party, because members of the editorial board in general do not publish in their “own” journal In other words,

an editorial change of course of a 180° The editors only deviated from this policy once: to celebrate its 75-year existence, a jubilee issue was published, with some delay, as Volume 75, no 4 The special issue features specimens of the scholarly work of a number of the editors themselves

10 “a) Oorspronkelijke stukken, die vaak detailkwesties zullen behandelen b) Artikelen van meer algemene aard, kritiese overzichten gevende van een of ander belangrijk studieonderdeel.”

11 “studies die nieuwe gezichtspunten openen, (mogen) niet ontbreken Mocht de betreffende gever niet genegen zijn’t boek aan de redaksie te zenden, dan zal deze het zich op eigen kosten aanschaffen.”

uit-12 “Hoewel het tijdschrift hoofdzakelik wordt opgericht om’t wetenschappelik werk van Hollandse

fi lologen te publiceren, zal de redaksie ook trachten nu en dan stukken van buitenlandse geleerden

op te nemen.”

13 “Nogmaals wordt in herinnering gebracht dat vóór alles ons tijdschrift haar nationaal karakter moet behouden, tenzij zeer groote buitenlanders meewerken.”

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Between the fi rst and second editorial board meetings the news about the journal appears to have spread in the Netherlands, as the minutes of the second meeting report on the externally expressed desires of classicists and scholars of Dutch lan-guage and literature to participate They are welcome, if only their contributions are related to the modern languages For the scholars of Dutch language and literature this meant concentrating on their own publishing bodies, but a long-lasting collabo-ration, both fertile and laborious, developed with the (neo-)classicists, leading to the rapid adoption of a classicist as a member of the editorial board

The fi fth editorial meeting on November 8, 1915, is again led by Salverda de Grave, but not until after he “has congratulated the secretary with issue number 1.” 14 This ostentatiously understated celebration of the publication of the fi rst issue of the

fi rst volume (1916) suggests that it must have appeared before 8 November 1915

Immediately afterwards, the editors commence compiling the second issue They also spend a substantial amount of time and energy on the organisation of so-called

“exchange periodicals.” 15 It was especially important for the American market to achieve a regular exchange with as many kindred periodicals as possible The pub-lisher is expected to make enough exchange issues available, for it is also in their own interest to position the new periodical internationally

Neophilologus and the Two World Wars

The foundation of Neophilologus during the Great War could easily have had

politi-cal or ideologipoliti-cal-humanitarian reasons After World War II the editors publish an editorial statement which is explicit on this point, as will be discussed later But the archived deliberations of the founding fathers do not reveal any such information All letters to and from foreign relations and exchange periodicals have one thing in common with the founding minutes: not a word about the war The foreign periodicals also restrict themselves to the sober observation that a new journal for the study of living modern languages and their literatures was founded in the Netherlands There are approving comments, but nowhere is this event linked to the

war, barring one exception: the announcement in Zeitschrift für französischen und

englischen Unterricht (Berlin 1916, offprint in the Neophilologus archives) starts

with “Mitten im Kriege.” The statement expresses surprise, but there is no enquiry into the motivations—and none is indeed available It seems that the editorial board chose to avoid problematic issues by circumventing them or letting them take care

of themselves, in line with a somewhat unusual motto for a journal: Writing is ver, silence is golden

This principle proved to be highly useful on several occasions in and after World War II During the German occupation of the Netherlands the editors quickly found

a mode to guarantee the continuation and regular publication of the journal The

14 “den secretaris met no 1 heeft gelukgewenscht.”

15 “ruilperiodieken.”

A Hundred Years of Neophilologus

main stance was to withdraw into the niche of “scholarly journals,” an apparently entirely uninteresting category from a propagandistic and ideological point of view,

which managed to successfully avoid Gleichschaltung (nazifi cation), unlike the

daily press, for instance The editorial board did not meet during the occupation, but the journal continued nonetheless to be published There were just a few issues which the editors needed to deal with, because the particular ukase was aimed at the entire periodical landscape

The fi rst issue concerned the position of the editor-in-chief of Neophilologus

Each periodical was required by the Germans to list its editor-in-chief by name and address, so that the person responsible for the publication was easily traceable should this be necessary The editorship had already become an issue in the summer

of 1941 when Wolters, the publisher, passed on the pressure exerted by the Department of Communication to the editorial board Now the strictly collegially

and democratically organisational structure of the Neophilologus board offered

more than enough substantive reason to reject this demand, but during an tion different laws prevail The way that the editors dealt with the demand therefore deserves all the more admiration They denied that the rule should also apply to scholarly journals, claimed that they belonged to a different governmental depart-ment, wrote letters to each other, to the publisher, to various departments—but there never came an editor-in-chief! The editors perfected the strategy of delaying the decision until it was abandoned altogether—something that they would use again, and with more emotions

It is Autumn 1943, when the Gleichschaltung reaches the palette of journals in

the form of a demand to associate with the Nazi-led Press Guild This time, too, the tools for “Operation Delay” were put in readiness, until the Reverend Professor Ferdinand Sassen, a Roman-Catholic priest, forced the hands of his fellow editors His letter has been preserved and deserves to be published here in full No longer clever manoeuvring, but brazen resistance Or was it?

I am told that the ‘responsible editors’ of various scholarly journals have been demanded these days to join the so-called Press Guild, and have been informed that this should have been done one and a half years ago Have You (the letter was addressed to the editorial secretary, Dr Gallas) received a similar letter?—I would very seriously object against such

an association of Neophilologus with the Press Guild First of all, such a demand is not

based on any regulation Scholarly journals completely fall outside the concern of the so- called Department of Information, of which the Press Guild is an organ, and are the respon- sibility of the Department of Education, etc Moreover, we should be ashamed before the entire Netherlands and before posterity, if we accepted the humiliating conditions of the so-called Press Guild What exactly is the precise content of these conditions I shall leave out of account for now, but we must be well aware of running the risk by joining that we will see our journal sink to the despicable level to which the Dutch daily papers have been lowered because of this association Temporarily discontinuing the publication of our jour- nal is much preferable and keeping our escutcheon unblotted On this day of Italy’s capitu- lation, it is probably less than ever the moment for us Dutchmen to dance to the tune of the

N S B (Dutch National Socialist Movement)

I think it will be good, whenever possible to spin out the matter for the time being, by notifying the senders of the letter concerned that scholarly journals do not pertain to them, while simultaneously inform the so-called Department of Education etc under protest that

S Onderdelinden

In this way Neophilologus managed to emerge from the war unscathed The fi rst

pages of the fi rst peace volume 1945 featured a declaration of policy, signed by the full editorial board, with the neutral title “Bij de dertigste jaargang.” The increased and still increasing infl uence of the English language appears from the inclusion of

a translation, immediately after the declaration: “On the issue of the thirtieth ume.” The text is partly a retrospect on the horrors of World War II:

The past tribulation was particularly heavy to bear for our nation In our stubborn tance, proud of our ages old independence, relying on our patriotism and our loyalty to the Royal dynasty, we have constantly kept our eyes fi xed on that future, well knowing that we would nor could ever be subjected 17

The winning rhetoric is rather euphoric and exposes popular fatherland clichés without making the “tribulation” concrete It is followed by a recollection of the foundation of the journal, thirty years ago The goal then (neatly explained in 1945!) had been: “To promulgate abroad Holland’s name in the fi eld of modern philology, and to strike a bridge between nations, till then antagonistic, by inviting

16 “Naar ik verneem, is aan de ‘verantwoordelijke redacteuren’ van verschillende wetenschappelijke tijdschriften dezer dagen de eisch gesteld tot aansluiting bij het z.g Persgilde, en ontvingen zij daarbij de mededeling, dat dit reeds anderhalf jaar geleden had moeten geschieden Hebt Gij ook een dergelijk schrijven ontvangen?—Tegen aansluiting van ‘Neophilologus’ bij het z.g Persgilde zou ik zeer ernstig bezwaar hebben Vooreerst steunt de eisch daartoe op geen enkele verordening Wetenschappelijke tijdschriften vallen geheel buiten de bemoeienis van het z.g Departement van Volksvoorlichting, waar het Persgilde een orgaan van is, en ressorteeren onder het z.g Departement van Opvoeding enz Daarenboven zouden wij ons voor geheel Nederland en voor het nageslacht moeten schamen, wanneer wij de vernederende voorwaarden van het z.g Persgilde aanvaardden Welke de nauwkeurige inhoud is van deze voorwaarden, laat ik nog buiten beschouwing, maar wij dienen er ons goed rekenschap van te geven, dat wij door aansluiting grote kans zouden loopen, ons tijdschrift te zien doen zinken tot het verachtelijk peil, waartoe de Nederlandsche dagbladpers door die aansluiting is teruggebracht Dan liever het verschijnen van het tijdschrift tijdelijk doen staken, en ons blazoen ongerept houden! Op den dag van de capitulatie van Italië is het waarlijk minder dan ooit het oogenblik voor ons Nederlanders om naar de pijpen van de N.S.B te dansen Het zal m.i goed zijn, c.q de zaak voorloopig te rekken, door aan de afzenders van het betref- fende schrijven te laten weten, dat wetenschappelijke tijdschriften hun niet aangaan, en tegelijk aan het z.g Departement van Opvoeding enz onder protest mede te delen, dat Volksvoorlichting (sic!) dezen eisch gesteld heeft De daarop volgende ruzie tussen de twee stellen compères geeft dan weer eenig uitstel.”

17 “Voor ons volk is die beproeving zeer zwaar geweest Het heeft in zijn hardnekkig verzet, trots

op zijn eeuwenoude onafhankelijkheid, steunend op zijn vaderlandsliefde en zijn trouw aan het vorstenhuis, steeds vol vertrouwen het oog gericht gehouden op die toekomst, wetend dat het niet tot onderwerping gedwongen kon worden.”

A Hundred Years of Neophilologus

collaborators into their arena.” 18 Although this aim does not appear from either the minutes of the fi rst meetings or an editorial presentation in one of the early issues of

Neophilologus , it is nonetheless commendable that thirty years on the founding

fathers keenly remembered the laudable function of scholarly bridge builders

between warring peoples They saw a clear line joining the tasks of Neophilologus

before the Great War and those after the Second World War

For the foundation of Neophilologus in the fi rst meetings of 1916 was a manifestation, a

confi rmation in the midst of what then seemed to be a world entirely out of joint Now that the disorganization seems general and worse than ever, we resume our task Constantly having in view the improvement of international relations and an enhancement of our national consequence, well aware that every endeavour is worth making, however modest it may be, if the ideal be pure and lofty 19

This editorial is a curious piece of prose, which raises more questions than it answers In which respect did the journal’s foundation, thirty years earlier, serve as

a signal? Does the phrase “disorganization … worse than ever” implicitly refer to the Holocaust? Could it not have been a little more explicit? What is actually meant with “the enhancement of our national consequence”? Is the well-intended but awk-wardly nationalistic phrase a remnant of the jargon of the occupation? However,

“the improvement of international relations” is phrased in an almost contemporary manner, albeit rather idealistically, when viewed with scientifi c sobriety Let us attribute this idealism to the euphoria of a new beginning, after the horrors of war and occupation

Still, the past was not yet completely over There were consequences and an aftermath The most important consequence for the journal followed immediately upon the euphoristic introduction just discussed and is headed by “Mededeling van

de redaksie” (Editorial Note):

As a result of his appointment as Director General of the Ministry of Education, Arts and Sciences, Prof Dr Ferd[inand] Sassen has decided to leave the Editorial Board The Publisher and Board must comply with this decision 20

His successor, Dr H H Janssen, had co-signed the preceding manifesto This editorial note had to make do without a signature Neither the chairman nor the secretary bade farewell to the new high-ranking ministerial offi cial Thus, Dr Sassen was not really given a cordial farewell, even though he had responded so completely

18 “Nederland’s naam op het gebied der moderne philologie bekend te maken in’t buitenland, en internationaal bruggen te slaan door medewerkers samen te brengen uit landen die elkaar toen bestreden.”

19 “De oprichting van Neophilologus op de eerste bijeenkomsten in 1916 (sic!) was immers een

getuigen, een bevestiging, te midden van wat toen een geheel ontredderde wereld scheen Thans,

nu die ontreddering zoveel vreeslijker is, nemen we die taak weer op ons, met de verhoging van onze volkswaarde en de verbetering van de internationale verhoudingen voor ogen, wetend dat elke poging, hoe bescheiden ook, waard is gedaan te worden, indien het streven hoog en zuiver is.”

20 “Naar aanleiding van zijn benoeming tot Directeur-generaal aan het Ministerie van Onderwijs, Kunsten en Wetenschappen heeft Prof Dr Ferd Sassen gemeend uit de Redaksie te moeten treden

Uitgever en Redaksie moeten dit besluit respecteren ”

S Onderdelinden

“pure and lofty” to the occupier’s demand to join the Press Guild Perhaps this detached tone must be attributed to the fact that at the Ministry Sassen was to be the successor of J[an] van Dam, Director General at the Department of Education and one of the country’s most prominent collaborators with the Germans A Germanist

at the University of Amsterdam, Van Dam had successively been a student, assistant

and collega proximus of J H Scholte, Neophilologus ’ chairman of the board

With Sassen, Scholte and van Dam the main actors have been mentioned of the post-war aftermath, which would once more stir up trouble by the end of 1949 In the same year, Jan van Dam was released from prison to which he had been sen-tenced by the War Crimes Tribunal Having been dishonourably discharged as a professor, van Dam expressed a desire to resume his studies To this end, he sent a

letter to Neophilologus with the request to be allowed to publish in the journal just

as he had done before the war The request was discussed in the editorial meeting of November 1949 as “a diffi cult issue,” as the minutes painstakingly record The deliberations were long and protracted and eventually the board, that included the

administrative clout of no fewer than three rectores magnifi ci , decided to disregard

van Dam’s request Like before, the consideration of “responding is silver, silence

is golden” prevailed This time, too, the well-tried delaying tactics appeared to be

successful Van Dan never published in Neophilologus again He earned his daily

bread in his fi nal active years as a corrector for a publisher of dictionaries

The Fiftieth Anniversary

On 5 March 1966 the Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant devoted a small column to the journal, headed with “ Neophilologus fi fty years old.” Quite adequately, it states that

the journal is “devoted to the study of the modern languages and literatures on a scholarly level.” The six founding professors are fi ttingly mentioned, followed by a discussion of the “brief preface” by the present editorial board of the recently pub-lished double-sized anniversary issue The fi rst conclusion quoted is “that the founders’ trust has not been misplaced, even though the journal was founded under diffi cult international circumstances.” On which this trust was based, or at which it was directed, is left unexplained, unfortunately—we know from the minutes that this trust for the greater part was self-confi dence on behalf of the founders

The newspaper continues (following the editorial preface) by formulating the aims of the quintinarian: “Especially in times of increasing specialization a journal like this fulfi ls a useful role, when the results of serious and broadly practised schol-arly workmanship are brought together.” Never had anyone articulated the journal’s

function so clearly; apparently, the NRC was following Neophilologus with approval

“As is known,” the newspaper rounds up, there are articles about and in various modern languages, as well as (at the time) book and reviews and journal announce-ments Subsequently, the newspaper exerts itself in going over the entire table of contents of the anniversary issue, to conclude (if facilely): “with this survey an impression is given of the spacious domain in which the celebrating journal

A Hundred Years of Neophilologus

operates.” Yet, it was a fi ne anniversary felicitation, and what it said of the broad and spacious domain was certainly true, as was its observation of the broadly practised scholarly workmanship

The NRC news item appears to be for a major part a translation from the English

editorial preface, mentioned above In the journal the Dutch language, originally

considered to be so important, has completely been replaced by English; the NRC

even claims that the journal “is edited in English.” The relation between the preface

in the fi ftieth anniversary issue and the newspaper item requires further ation here, for it is also especially important to establish what the congratulating newspaper did not adopt

The fi rst discrepancy is an editorial retrospect, which is missing in the NRC :

“The fi rst issue of Neophilologus appeared in 1916 without any prefatory statement

of its aims The middle of World War I was perhaps a strange moment to launch a new scholarly periodical devoted to the modern European languages.” So much self-refl ection had to be looked for in vain when the journal was founded, and in

1946 we even observed a considerable retouching of the truth This time, however, the absence of any policy statement and formulation of objectives is noted with a cool distance Moreover, the foundation of a journal in the middle of a war is labelled as a somewhat strange enterprise—albeit with the addition of “perhaps.”

The matter of the objectives of Neophilologus is now, in 1966, addressed more

broadly, more broadly that is as compared with the journal’s foundation, but also

more broadly—and this is the second discrepancy with the NRC congratulatory piece—than was mentioned in the newspaper: “The policy of Neophilologus has

always been constant: to publish scholarly articles on linguistic or literary subjects

in the fi eld of the modern languages, including their relationship with the classical

languages Neophilologus is concerned with positive contributions to knowledge

and eschews impressionistic essays, or ‘close reading’ as an end in itself.”

The tenacity with which the tradition is defended is striking: “For the time being, things will remain as they are” is still applicable Another poignant point is the refreshing of the relation with the classical languages, for the incorporation of the neoclassicists has always remained a cumbersome matter

The most striking point, however, in the 1966 editorial preface is the outcry against rather impressionistic contributions and against textual interpretation as an aim in itself The former is easily understood: impressionistic contributions about literature fairly quickly run the risk of becoming subjective and consequently of sinning against the strictly scholarly objectivity demanded by the editorial board The attack against the method of “close reading” is more surprising This “close reading” or “immanent textual interpretation” was an aim in itself in the 1960s, a very generally applied method of textual analysis, of which the defi nitive disclosure

of the meaning of a text was expected The method was popular in the 1950s and 1960s, and only afterwards new insights such as reception aesthetics and decon-structivism have liberated literary studies from the defi nitive interpretation So

when in 1966 the editorial board of Neophilologus expressed their opposition to

“close reading” as an objective in itself, one wonders whether here some form of contextualization—psychological, sociological or historical—is required, but the

S Onderdelinden

preface is too short to reach to any conclusions The methodological positioning is nonetheless surprising Detestation of fashionable literary-theoretical currents may very well have been the underlying reason

The third discrepancy with the newspaper article is the turn at the end, which is

a word of gratitude to the Publisher While the NRC begins with a restrained “the

journal published by J B Wolters in Groningen,” the editors end with an elegant courtesy: “And they would not wish this anniversary to pass by without thanking the publishers, Messrs J B Wolters of Groningen, for their loyal co-operation over the past half century.” Indeed, Wolters had been loyal, up to the brink of fi nancial loss But more about this below

A Self-portrait

In 1988, the sister journal Romanische Forschungen published its one hundredth

volume The journal had, quite venerably, been founded as early as 1883, but had been forced to allow for some irregularity of appearance due to two World Wars However, now there was occasion for a festive remembrance of having achieved the milestone: one hundred volumes The editorial board had had the brilliant idea of inviting all journals devoted to romanistics from all over the world to supply a self- portrait The participation of some sixty journals produced an impressive portrait

gallery, to which Neophilologus , although only romanistic in part-time, was allowed

to contribute The then member of the editorial board, Professor Q I M Mok, wrote the article for which he was highly praised by his fellow editors Even though

Romanische Forschungen was edited in German, Mok obviously wrote in French

His wonderful article does not invite for much criticism, so that his valuable observations will be followed here with care Nonetheless, in his opening sentence two points require to be put in perspective The sentence runs as follows: “Fondé en

1916, en pleine guerre mondiale, Neophilologus a pu paraître sans aucune

interrup-tion jusq’à nos jours.” The year of foundainterrup-tion has already been commented on above, but the proud claim that follows must be taken with some salt The volume for 1947 is wanting, something which has brought about an interruption (otherwise

2016 would have released the 101th volume) The reason was the stepping down of

no fewer than three founding fathers, the anglicist A E H Swaen, the romanist J J Salverda de Grave (who had been chairman of the board for thirty years) and the secretary, K R Gallas, who was at the same time a romanist fellow-editor Small wonder that the publishing machine halted for a moment

Dr Mok took as his starting point the absence of long statements of principles

and policy: “ … les fondateurs ne semblent pas avoir cru nécessaire d’en formuler nettement les fi ns … ” and he refers to the short Dutch characterization of “journal

for the scholarly study of the modern languages and their literatures.” 21 This lation was slightly changed a number of times and adapted, pretty soon with the

formu-21 “tijdschrift voor de wetenschappelijke beoefening der moderne talen en haar letterkunden.”

A Hundred Years of Neophilologus

“quels étaient les lecteurs visés par les fondateurs.” This interesting question was wholly justifi ed from the point of view of reception aesthetics The founders, by contrast, had exclusively been thinking in terms of production aesthetics, for they wanted to create a publication forum, and the indications are that they assumed that when there was suffi cient quality the readers would come automatically The jour-nal originally was produced by and for Dutch scholars without excluding foreign-ers, that is, in as far as they were able to understand Dutch As far as the Dutch market was concerned, the intended readership comprised language teachers of all levels—in those days teachers would occasionally write a doctoral dissertation However, this changed, from less usual to practically impossible, and with the beginning of volume 31 the editors had to admit that the times had changed:

We know that in these post-war years teachers are usually burdened with teaching hours, with extra teaching of pupils who had to leave the East Indies, with guarding, with fi nancial worries for the family and with a desire to catch up with a backlog of fi ve, six years of inter- est and studies, as best as they can 22

It is fascinating to realize how Scholte and Gallas, the composers of this text, aged to include both the war past and the post-colonial topicality in one sentence The logical consequence in any case of this development was internationalization and with it an increasing transition to the languages studied in the journal as work-ing languages, at the expense of Dutch:

En 1968, les auteurs sont informés: “Only in exceptional cases are reviews written in Dutch accepted for publication” Et à partir de 1972: “The normal languages of publication are English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, but articles in other languages may also be submitted for consideration by the Editorial Board” Cet avis, qui implique le refoulement

du néerlandais, ne fait qu’institutionnaliser une situation de fait, le dernier article en landais ayant paru en 1964

The notifi cation concerning the languages suitable for publication is still the second half of the mission statement in the colophon of each issue of the journal The fi rst part had also been adapted, in 1972, and at the instigation of Dr H P H Teesing, who had joined the board in 1971 but died in 1973 Nonetheless, his very short membership of the board had an immediate consequence, a change of mission statement:

22 “Wij weten dat de leraar in deze na-oorlogse jaren meestal overstelpt is met lesuren, met bijwerken van leerlingen die Indië moesten verlaten, met correctiewerk, met fi nanciële zorgen voor het gezin, en dat ze een achterstand van vijf, zes jaar belangstelling en studie willen inhalen, zo goed dat kan.”

S Onderdelinden

Cette modifi cation est inspirée par les développements de l’enseignement et de la recherche universitaires et par la réorientation des centres d’intérêt qui en résulte En même temps, elle fait mieux ressortir le caractère international de la revue Sa formulation se passe de

commentaire Dorénavant, Neophilologus sera “an international journal devoted to the

study of modern and mediaeval language and literature, including general linguistics, ary theory and comparative literature.”

Every change of direction has its assets and liabilities Offset against the profi t of internationalization there was the disappearance of Dutch and the link with the clas-sical languages Leave was taken, too, of the space-demanding review section, just

as the announcements of journals and books

The change brought with it a shift in responsibilities for the editors: from writing and publishing to judging and editing In the above self-characterization the only thing that need to be added between “international” and “journal” was the word

“peer-reviewed” to fi x the transition from a Dutch publication forum to an tional collecting-basin of fi rst-rate research future-proof and “nettement” Dr Mok opines on the editors’ present task:

Ils n’ont plus qu’à faire une sélection rigoureusement critique dans la masse des manuscrits qui leur parviennent, sans qu’ils les aient sollicités, de la main de chercheurs de plus en plus nombreux pour qui une publication dans une revue internationalement reconnue est deve- nue une question de vie ou de mort scientifi que

Along with all these innovations, inspired by the evolution of the scientifi c world, Mok also discerns an important continuity so characteristic of the journal, namely the continuity of diversity One of the disadvantages that Mok notes, for example, is the relatively small number of pages available for each section every three months

It is a disadvantage that still applies to the printed version, but as a result of digitalization this is no longer relevant in the worldwide web

Another disadvantage noted by Mok: “Il est vrai que cette diversité diminue considérablement la possibilité de réaliser certains voeux tels que la mise sur pied d’un numéro thématique d’une envergure quelque peu large.” Indeed, this is true, but in recent years (impossible for Mok to know yet) an exception was made: In July 2006—it was vol XC.3—a special issue appeared on “The Composition of Books

of Poetry.” Both the initiative and the basic concept came from the editor E(vert) van der Starre who unfortunately had passed away in 2004, so that his tenaciously

advocated initiative eventually was published as an In Memoriam

An advantage of the diversity pointed out by Mok was that the various sections

in the journal operate independently from each other, which opened the road for specialization per section:

Il suffi t de comparer sur une longue période le domaine anglais et le domaine français pour constater que, pour l’anglais, l’accent tombe surtout sur la linguistique et la philologie de l’ancien et du moyen anglais (ce sont ces branches-là pour lesquelles Neophilologus est hautement apprécié des anglicistes), alors que pour le français, c’est plutôt la littérature postmédiévale, de Rabelais à Pinget, qui occupe le plus de place

With respect to the German section, to mention a last example, the focus was, and still is, directed to the literature of the twentieth century Certainly not exclusively,

A Hundred Years of Neophilologus

for the Middle Ages and Goethe frequently enough make their appearance, but, at least quantitatively, more attention is paid to Thomas Mann Thus, the journal’s diversity had various sides to it, and Dr Mok had not even yet treated them exhaus-tively, as will become clear from the following section

Still, the issue of Neophilologus ’s attraction through diversity has been made,

which allowed Dr Mok with full confi dence to make a fi nal remark concerning the

expectations for the future on the part of the Neophilologus readership: “chacun

s’attend à trouver ce qu’il a l’habitude de chercher, attente à laquelle la revue telle qu’elle est espère encore longtemps pouvoir répondre.” One can only join Dr Mok

in this wish, while at the same time acknowledging that for the past thirty years his wish has come true

A Methodological Discussion

The theoretical framework of any article submitted is, as a matter of course, a point

of attention for the editor whose task it is to assess it Equally self-explanatory this point is not brought up for discussion during the editorial meetings; hence, the his-tory of literary research preponderantly is generally mirrored implicitly in the choice of the articles submitted Thus, before World War II, a form of contextual-izing was deemed to be decisive which fi tted classical texts into the appurtenant humanistic current, for example, the Romantic Movement Textual interpretation was practiced to lay bare a purely literary-historical background A post-war counter- movement was to be expected: instead of establishing a context through the

Zeitgeist , the 1950s and 1960s called for an aversion to this disturbing infl uence of

literary history The interpretative attention was limited to the text itself, an tric approach that led to both exciting and boring demonstrations of immanent tex-tual exegesis

Even when in the 1970s a new form of contextualization became fashionable, reception aesthetics never really lost touch with the texts to be analysed Purely

theory-oriented research rarely made it to the pages of Neophilologus ; rather, our

contributors were always looking for the way to textual analysis This approach can certainly be seen as a matter of continuity In addition, the fashion, or the scholarly evolution in all its variants, to use a more neutral turn of phrase, offered opportunities for innovation This trend had to be canalized by the editors when in the 1990s there came a fl ood of gender articles The qualitatively best of these submissions were

eagerly published, but the board (then completely male) ensured Neophilologus

from ending up as a feminist journal

However, on 24 January 1998 a methodological discussion found its way to the minutes The editor for the section General, which opens each issue and was there-fore expected to be responsible for accommodating theory-driven articles, Dr Bronzwaer, shared a dilemma that kept bothering him: “These days more and more articles in the fi eld of advanced post-modern theories are being submitted, which do

S Onderdelinden

not fi t the traditional profi le of out journal.” 23 What is particularly striking is the way

he expressed himself: the traditional profi le From Bronzwaer’s hesitant opinion of post-modern examinations a discussion evolved on the necessity of a moderate methodological reform, at least fl exibility, albeit, one of the editors maintained, not

at the expense of legibility The concept of fl exibility appears to have appealed to the editorial board Dr Crespo formulated the conclusion with respect to the profi le:

“The journal’s force rests in its disparity.” 24 Instead of the rather negative tions of “disparaty” (and because of the phonetic proximity of Dutch “disparaatheid” [“disparity”] to “desperaatheid” [“despair”]), the majority preferred to the term

connota-“diversity,” employed by Dr Mok in his much-praised portrait of Neophilologus

This diversity would come to represent the aspect of innovation, not just methodically but also the topographical spread of the contributing scholars After all, globalization was also infl uencing literary studies, and in addition to Europe and North America, authors from non-Western countries such as Indonesia, China and Taiwan were now submitting their work to the journal Globalized subjects, such as post- colonial criticism, too, were covered by this diversifying innovation However,

at the same time as a factor of methodological continuity, attention would remain unaltered for the somewhat traditionally practical interpretation of, on the whole, canonical texts Additionally, the virtue of the interpretative craftsmanship was to

be maintained within the journal’s profi le

The Publisher

The communication between the editorial board and the publisher is interesting enough to merit a short inspection For instance, in February 2000, a meeting was held between the then publisher Kluwer Academic Publishers B.V and the executive editor, Dr W(illem) Koopman A record in English of the meeting found its way to the archives (“Short Minutes”), of which especially the heading and open-ing lines deserve to be quoted:

History of Neophilologus:

Neophilologus has been successfully published as of 1916 by Wolters in Groningen, concentrating on language and literature The journal came into being in the philology- tradition and therefore is not restrictive in period of time (from medieval to modern) or language (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian) As of 1993 (= Volume 41) the jour- nal is being published by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Apparently, there are other ways: the history of Neophilologus in fi ve lines A minor

correction: Volume 77 was produced in 1993, vol 41 was published in 1957 And the period from 2000 to 2016 can be summarized equally quickly: since 2005 the

23 “Tegenwoordig worden steeds meer artikelen op het gebied van geavanceerde postmoderne rieën aangeboden, die echter niet in het traditionele profi el van ons tijdschrift passen.”

theo-24 “De kracht van het tijdschrift ligt in de disparaatheid ervan.”

A Hundred Years of Neophilologus

had shown every sympathy for the fact that the editors were unhappy about not having been informed of the changes at an earlier date I [i.e a representative of Kluwer’s] cannot but recall that, after we had expressed our regret about the whole business, the case was consid- ered to be closed and the future of the magazine had been celebrated during a cozy dinner 25

It appears the board had also deemed it necessary to fi x their discontent in written form as well—in other words, this exchange of letters was no more than a striking example of crying over spilt milk

Overall, the cooperation between the successive editorial boards and the ers vacillated between silently and smoothly, except during the Interbellum In

publish-1915, the founders had directed themselves quite understandably to the publishing house of J B Wolters, which had already made a fi ne reputation in the fi eld of edu-cation, for example, with the Bos atlas, a familiar name in the Netherlands ever since 1877 The cooperation seemed to work fi ne in the early years until on 11 October 1920 a special meeting of the editorial board was convened: “to deliberate about what steps the board should take, now that Wolters has decided to limit the size of the publication, possibly even to stop it.” 26 The minutes exhale some panic:

“In turn the members of the board and the editorial secretary suggest means to avert

this danger, since all want to try to save Neoph , because it has become dear to them

and also because they want it to maintain its useful role in the Dutch scholarly world

as well as in the international relations.” 27 In this particular order

Next follows a long list of measures, the fi rst two of which are: “giving up the honorarium [??!!], reduction of the number of offprints,” but also “increasing the subscription (to Dfl 10.00),” and “abolishing the honorarium [!?] for the board

25 “er alle begrip voor getoond (had), dat de redactie ongelukkig was met het feit dat ze niet eerder van de veranderingen op de hoogte was gesteld Ik kan mij niet anders herinneren dan dat wij, nadat wij hierover onze spijt hadden betuigd, de zaak als afgedaan hebben beschouwd en de toekomst van het tijdschrift tijdens een gezellig diner hebben gevierd.”

26 “om te beraadslagen over hetgeen de redactie te doen staat, nu de fi rma Wolters plotseling tot een beperkte uitgave, eventueel tot opheffi ng van’t tijdschrift heeft besloten”

27 “Achtereenvolgens worden door de leden van de redactie en de secretaris middelen gesuggereerd

om dit gevaar af te wenden, daar allen Neoph willen trachten te behouden, omdat het hun lief is geworden én omdat het zijn nuttige rol in de Nederlandsche wetenschap en in de internationale relaties moet blijven vervullen”

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members, reduction of the size (…), expansion of the board by including foreign members (…) In its turn, the board, in order to prevent a catastrophe, will seek sup-port through a state subsidy (to be requested by the chairman of the editorial board and Dr Schrijnen).” 28 It was a small world indeed in those days and the subsidy did come, to the amount of Dfl 2000.00 Consequently, the next minutes, of February

1922, quite understandably included the remark: “Our deep gratitude will be expressed to the minister.” 29 With this subsidy, the board was able to move Wolters Publishers to continue the publication of the journal, and thus the greatest crisis in

the history of Neophilologus was successfully averted

More than a decade the journal was fi nancially thriving, but in November 1933 the managing editor had to make mention of a message from the Ministry of Education, Arts and Sciences: the subsidy was to be halved, namely “that it will amount to Dfl 1000.00 for 1933 and will probably be further reduced Following from this, it is discussed to what extent it would be possible, if Wolters Publishers abolish the journal, to move the publication to another fi rm.” 30 It is striking to see with how much more editorial-managing self-esteem this bad news was received The relations with Wolters Publishers had become so close in the meantime, that despite the implemented reduction the minutes report in 1934:

The commercial management of the journal is discussed; it is found that the company Wolters, who has had to suffer losses, deserves the gratitude of the editorial board, since it allows the journal to perpetuate, even though it does not live up to the expectations it raised when it was founded 31

The organizational worries were not yet over, though, for the subscriptions fl uctuate dramatically from national to international, the Dutch teachers quit as readers (and

as authors), “because interest in study is in danger of being killed by the current regulations which result in an overload of the worst kind.” 32 And in 1934 the editorial secretary complains that “the number of submissions from Germany,” pre-sumably because of political reasons, “increases tremendously, which may not be

28 “afschaffi ng van het honorarium, beperking der afdrukjes;” “verhooging van den mentsprijs (tot f 10.-);” “afschaffi ng van’t honorarium voor de medewerkers, reductie van den omvang (…), uitbreiding van de redactie door opneming van buitenlandsche leden (…) De redac- tie van haar zijde zal, om een catastrophe te voorkomen, steun zien te verkrijgen door een regeer- ingssubsidie (aan te vragen in een audiëntie door den voorzitter en den Hr Schrijnen).”

abonne-29 “Den minister zal worden uitgedrukt onze groote erkentelijkheid.”

30 “dat zij over 1933 f 1000.- zal bedragen en waarschijnlijk nog worden verlaagd Naar aanleiding daarvan wordt besproken in hoever het mogelijk is, indien de fi rma Wolters het tijdschrift opheft, tot exploitatie met een andere fi rma over te gaan.”

31 “Over de exploitatie van het tijdschrift wordt gediscussieerd; vastgesteld wordt, dat de fi rma Wolters, die verlies op de exploitatie heeft, den dank der redactie verdient, omdat zij het tijdschrift laat voortbestaan, hoewel het niet beantwoordt aan datgene, wat zij zich voorstelde, toen het werd opgericht.”

32 “omdat belangstelling voor studie gevaar loopt, gedood te worden door de vigeerende voorschriften, die een overlading van de ergste soort ten gevolge hebben.”

A Hundred Years of Neophilologus

favourable for the national character of the journal.” 33 But all these fl uctuations in

no way diminished the continuing prosperous cooperation with Wolters Publishers—witness the words of gratitude on the occasion of the fi fty-years anniversary quoted above

After the somewhat turbulent early years, Neophilologus , from Wolters to Kluwer to Springer, was granted to sail in calm waters The present-day new devel-opments, as a matter of course mainly via the Internet, have been smoothly imple-mented and executed In this process, the slogan “For the time being, things will remain as they are” applies to the printed version, while innovatively all volumes

have become available via springerlink.com Thus equipped, Neophilologus has

made its fi rst steps into its second century

The Board Meetings

Each member of the editorial board with great pleasure takes the responsibility for assessing and having assessed the articles in the fi eld of his (more rarely: her) lan-guage and discipline Only once every three months does the board convene, mainly

in order to establish the contents of the next issue but also regularly to discuss the editorial policy The locations of these meetings are in fact completely unimportant Whether in unsightly rooms or in stately university offi ces, the editors always feel

at home wherever they meet, so that it is rather arbitrary in what town they come together Amsterdam, The Hague and more recently Utrecht seem to be preferred The meetings themselves are short and only rarely turbulent Each editor has done their homework, of course, something which surely promotes a speedy meeting Because each editor has their own specialisation, a competition-free situation prevails, an event which rarely occurs in the professional lives of most editors, so that the meetings are usually experienced as a serene oasis Finally there is full opportunity to have the joys of collegiality do their work Small wonder, therefore, that the business part of the meetings on average can be processed free of confl ict and in high speed Then it is quickly time for the second, more important part of the editorial meetings: a joint meal

Many arguments can be adduced in support of this part of the editorial duties An exhaustive treatment is impossible for reasons of space, but some aspects call for attention (Needless to say that not all details of the culinary programme require mention here.)

First of all, there is an exchange of thoughts about university policies, sometimes expanded to include educational policies The editors being attached to different universities offers an excellent opportunity to compare the measures—usually

fi nancial cuts for that matter—that faculties take To the previously mentioned joy

of collegiality now the equally concept of solidarity can be added In the olden days

33 “het aantal aanbiedingen van werk uit Duitschland … zeer toeneemt, hetgeen voor het nationaal karakter van het tijdschrift niet gunstig kan zijn.”

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of professorial infl uence the informal contacts through the board of Neophilologus

as a factor of power should not be underestimated One of the meetings, that of November 1949 which has already been brought up in a different context, begins

with the chairman contentedly noting that no fewer than three rectores magnifi ci

were present It is quite self-evident that a good deal of university policies with respect to the faculty of arts was reviewed This would continue to well into the 1970s, when the antagonistic developments of democratization and professionalization led to professors having to give up a part of their power Still, even in the more recent constellation of reversals and cuts, of regroupings of departments and shifts from a Faculty of Arts to one of Humanities or Culture Studies, the exchange of university and faculty plans for the future remains an important topic for conversation and discussion, albeit that the solidarity hoped for

at most elicits some commiseration

Sometimes, though, the phase of editorial controversy cannot be avoided Then, too, the second half of the meeting is of the greatest importance In a rare but inci-sive case of editorial discord the situation evolved to nothing less than a crisis It concerns fortunately an incident that took place in the previous millennium It then appeared how crucial it appeared to that for the second half of the meeting a restau-rant had been reserved that prided itself in a vast collection of Italian grappas The editorial controversy was effectively washed away with grappa Until then the pub-

lisher silently settled the bill for the Neophilologus lunches But the grappa excess

led to measures The publisher issued a cold ukase that such alcoholic orgies from then on were to be paid for by the editors themselves Since then the board has effortlessly succeeded to meet entirely confl ict-free, both in the fi rst and in the sec-ond half

(translation from Dutch: Rolf H Bremmer Jr, with the assistance of Usha Wilbers and Thijs Porck)

A Hundred Years of Neophilologus

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

R H Bremmer Jr et al (eds.), Tracing Paradigms: One Hundred Years of

Current Editorial Board

The current editorial board of Neophilologus : top: Thijs Porck, Johannes Müller, Usha Wilbers and

Paul Smith; bottom: Rina Walthaus, Rolf Bremmer, Frans Ruiter and Sjaak Onderdelinden (not present: Roberto Crespo)

T Porck

Editors of Neophilologus

1916–2016 Prof Dr J J A A Frantzen Prof Dr K R Gallas, editorial secretary (1916–1923) (1916–1948)

Prof Dr J J Salverda de Grave (1916–1964)

Mr W E Jansen, editorial secretary (1972)

Dr W F Koopman, executive editor (1973–2011)