Consumptie en consumentisme in het recente Nederlandse proza
Consumption and Consumerism in the Contemporary Dutch and Flemish Fiction

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the contemporary literary discourse about globalization and focuses especially on its economic aspect as it manifests itself in the life of the western citizen, that is to say as consumption, or possibly, as consumerism. During the current wave of globalization, roughly since the beginning of the nineties of the twentieth century, this broad and multi-layered term has been used mainly in the economic sense, and the attention has been paid especially to the negative consequences for the inhabitants of the whole world. The theoretical part of this article is based on specialized, particularly sociological literature and focuses on what it nowadays means to be a consumer. It presents the different kinds of consumers, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the characteristics of the consumer society as utopia/ dystopia, Ritzer’s McDonaldization etc. The other part analyzes the representations of these phenomena, connected with consumption and consumerism of the globalized world, in selected fiction by Dutch and Flemish authors: Gimmick! by Joost Zwagerman, the trilogy Toast by Paul Mennes, De general met de zes vingers by Yasmine Allas and Het derde huwelijk by Tom Lanoye. The aim is to sketch out the image of the contemporary consumer’s life that is represented and accentuated by the selected novels.

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