De twee kanten van een kunstwerk. Over ‘Landschap met vogels’ van Stefan Hertmans

Samenvatting

Traditionally, scholars of visual artworks in novels have focused on theories on intermediality and ekphrasis, which are used to look at the verbal representation and meaning of the artwork embedded. I want to go beyond this rather traditional research and take into account the ‘thingly’ aspects of artworks in stories as well: what is the role of the artwork-as-object in the narrative? what kind of relationship do the characters have with it? and how is that all transmitted by the narrator? In what follows, I use thing theory to look at ‘Landschap met vogels’ by Stefan Hertmans, in which the artwork functions both as ‘picture’ and as object. I show that Hertmans’s text, by using mirroring and copying techniques, takes on the same double role as the artwork it narrates about.