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Document Details :

Title: Claus, Shelley, Coetzee, Stevens
Subtitle: Een casestudy over de transformatieve identiteit van wereldliteratuur
Author(s): EECKHOUT, Bart
Journal: Spiegel der Letteren
Volume: 53    Issue: 3   Date: 2011   
Pages: 357-387
DOI: 10.2143/SDL.53.3.2131164

Abstract :
From a text-genetic perspective, this contribution analyzes the transformative identity of a text that is part of ‘world literature’, the poem ‘Ten Ways of Looking at P.B. Shelley’ by Hugo Claus. To this end, a reverse chronological scenario is developed in which the poem is hypothetically discussed in a seminar conducted by an expert in the contemporary study of world literature, David Damrosch. Starting from the recent English translation of Claus’s poem by J.M. Coetzee, the discussion focuses first on the ways in which both the life of the English romantic poet P.B. Shelley and his poem ‘Ode to the West Wind’ are worked into the poem. It continues by investigating how Claus simultaneously made use of the poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ by the American modernist Wallace Stevens. Finally, the investigation zooms in on an earlier version of Claus’s poem and, before that, a translation of Stevens’s poem by Claus.

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