Articles

Nietigste vormen, groots zwijgen: een functionele benadering van microverhalen in Marie Kessels’ Het nietigste (2002)

---

Abstract

In this paper, I highlight Het nietigste (2002) by Dutch author Marie Kessels functionally as a collection of microstories, and later more specifically as a novel-in-microstories. Both genres continue to be rarely discussed in Dutch-language literary studies, while very short stories have been enjoying renewed interest worldwide since the late 1980s. At the micro level, the stories are identified as microstories that operate on the principle of narrative sparsity. At the macro level, the work is approached as a novel-in-microstories, in which weak narrative and strong thematic progression form the starting point. The analysis then moves between form and content to approach Kesselsʼ contrasting poetics of microstories."

How to Cite:

Dejonckheere, K., (2023) “Nietigste vormen, groots zwijgen: een functionele benadering van microverhalen in Marie Kessels’ Het nietigste (2002)”, Handelingen - Koninklijke Zuid-Nederlandse maatschappij voor taal- en letterkunde en geschiedenis 77, 43–62. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/kzm.100789

Rights:

@ the author(s)