Biography

Yves T’Sjoen (°1966) is an associate professor in the Department of Dutch Literature and Literary Theory at Ghent University. He specializes in the study of interbellum literature in Flanders and the Netherlands, and also does research on modern textual editing and poetry analysis. His publications focus on editing theory and the analysis of poetry in the Netherlands and Flanders, in the interbellum period and after the Second World War. He has edited works by, among others, Louis Paul Boon, Cyriel Buysse, Gust Gils, Richard Minne, Wies Moens, Hugues C. Pernath, Paul Snoek, Eddy van Vliet, and Karel van de Woestijne.

The analyses of the work of the Flemish Movement of Fifty (“Vlaamse Vijftigers”; i.e., Albert Bontridder, Louis Paul Boon, Ben Cami, Hugo Claus, Remy C. van de Kerckhove, Marcel Wauters), about whom T’Sjoen has held several lecture series (UGent, 2006; KANTL, 2007), emphasize the way in which these poets dealt with the trauma of the Second World War and, in their postwar poetry, sought a poetic/formal equivalent for “a time marked by despair and upheaval” but also by a certain voluntarism. Not only is the work of the Tijd en Mens poets pervaded by the theme of war and do existentialist philosophical ideas appear to inform their literary work. Apart from the emphatically ethical layer in these poems and prose texts, the (fragmentary) formal idiom and the use of (associative) figurative language, among other aspects, are also studied from a trauma-theoretical perspective.

In the academic year 2007-2008 (second semester; February-May 2008) T’Sjoen teaches the following research seminars (in Dutch):

• Bachelor 3: ‘Frontpoëzie in Vlaanderen’ – een onderzoek naar de poëzie van Vlaamse frontsoldaten tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog (August van Cauwelaert, Daan Boens, Fritz Francken, Filip de Pillecyn e.a.).
• Master: ‘Vlaamse literatuur in bezettingstijd (Tweede Wereldoorlog)’ – een onderzoek naar het literaire werk en de politiek-ideologische positionering van enkele ‘verbrande schrijvers’ in Vlaanderen tijdens de Duitse bezettingsjaren.

Contact

Department of Dutch Literature and Literary Theory