Swiss Author Research Articles

Two Datasets of Genetic Dossiers and Authorial Manuscripts

Abstract In genetic criticism, scholarly editing, authorial philology and, more generally, for the study of authorial manuscripts and writing processes, it is essential to order and classify the textual witnesses and their relationships. This article presents two datasets of so-called ‘genetic networks’, that is representation of the genetic entities (witnesses, publications, dossiers) and their relationships, modelled according to the geno 1.0 ontology. The datasets contain genetic networks of the works of two Swiss authors: the main publications of Gustave Roud (1897–1976) and the short story “En mer” by Bernard Comment (1960).

Schweizerische Drucke in den bürgerlichen frühneuzeitlichen Privatbibliotheken in den Prager Städten

Based on an analysis of the probate inventories of the burghers of the New Town of Prague in the 17th century, the paper identifies religious and secular literature produced by Swiss printers in Prague burgher private libraries and examines its occurrence in the context of the development of a multi-confessional society in Bohemia before the Thirty Years’ War and subsequently in the phase of the recatholization policy towards a mono-confessional Catholic society. The prints of Swiss printers are analysed in the context of their contemporary offer on the Central European book market in Frankfurt a. M., which was mainly imported to Prague by Nuremberg merchants, and also in the context of the local Prague market, which offered titles by Swiss authors in translation. The reception of Swiss printed literature in the Prague towns is compared with the situation in one of the typical royal towns in Bohemia. The role of the Unity of Brothers in the reception of the production of Swiss printers is also taken into account.

Swiss Literature and its Links to the European Literary Tradition

This paper provides an in-depth exploration of the interconnectedness of Swiss literature within the larger framework of European literary tradition. Through a comprehensive analysis of Swiss authors such as Herman Hesse, Blaise Cendrars, Jeremias Gotthelf, Peter Stamm, Max Frisch, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and Fleur Jaeggy, it sheds light on the significant influence of European literary movements on Swiss literature. These movements encompass romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, and avant-garde, which have been reflected and reframed through a uniquely Swiss lens. Furthermore, the paper presents a detailed examination of specific Swiss literary works to illustrate shared thematic concerns and stylistic nuances that transcend national and linguistic boundaries. The study underscores the importance of cultural exchange in enriching literary traditions and promotes a deeper understanding of the universal human experiences portrayed within Swiss and European literature.

Александр Маурер. Шарль Секретан: эволюция его мысли. Предисловие к переводу

The article by the Swiss author, published in translation, vividly and expressively reveals the nature of the personality and work of Charles Secretan (1815–1895), an outstanding philosopher of Switzerland of the 19th century, in the historical context in which they developed. The author of the article convincingly shows the difficulty of unambiguous historical and philosophical characteristics of Secretan’s philosophy, which is based on the religious-metaphysical doctrine of freedom and moral obligation. Maurer approaches the coverage of Secretan’s philosophy, trying to understand it not only as a result of certain philosophical and religious influences, but also as a reflection of “his time and his country”. The author of the article presents the evolution of Secretan's work as a departure from the speculative-deductive method of German idealists-systematists, characteristic of its first period, which is manifested in the Swiss philosopher’s appeal to the actual moral and socio-political problems of his time. Maurer’s article can be useful not only to specialists in the history of philosophy, but also to a wider circle of readers interested in the thought of the 19th century, without knowledge of which it is impossible to understand modern Western philosophy.

DENIS DE ROUGEMONT AND THE WESTERN CONCEPTION OF LOVE

This paper analyses the key areas reached by the Swiss author Denis de Rougemont in his famous work Love in the Western World. We critically read de Rougemont's thought that love-passion, as the basic guiding thread of the myth of Tristan and Isolde, still sovereignly rules the unconscious being of modern man, giving him a one-sided vision of the play about love. Following his argumentation, we examine the connections between courtly and chivalrous love, Cathar heresy and troubadour love poetry. Denis de Rougemont contrasts eros, which ignites passion that descends into the darkness of death, with agape, i.e. the Christian love for one's neighbour. We question whether de Rougemont's solution to the problem of love by establishing merciful love as a necessary moral choice can be a satisfactory answer for modern man.

ZUR ÜBERSETZUNG JOHANNA SPYRIS KINDERROMANS „HEIDI“ INS RUMÄNISCHE

The children's novel "Heidi" by the Swiss author Johanna Spyri is one of the most famous works of children's literature worldwide. Accordingly, it has been published in Romania in numerous translations, especially after 2008. What is also special about these translations is the fact that most of them were not translated from German but from English. The present article sets out to analyse some relevant aspects of translation, based on the theoretical considerations of relevant theorists in the field of translation of children's literature.

Face to face

FACE TO FACE: FRANCO BELTRAMETTI AND JUDITH DANCIGER: A COUPLE OF TRANSLATORS
 In 1973 Franco Beltrametti, a Swiss author strictly connected to both the authors of the Beat Generation and to those of the Italian neo-avant-garde (Gruppo 63), published a bilingual collection of poems in Italian and English that he significantly titled Face to face (Grosseteste, England). As stated in the book itself, the English versions are translations by the author and his American wife, Judith Danciger. They were later checked and revised by Cid Corman to whom the book is dedicated. By taking into consideration the different versions of these poems which are preserved in the Swiss Literary Archives (Bern), this paper continues a previous research on this still little known and studied author and aims to examine the different phases of this work between languages by the couple. Face to face emerges as strongly representative of the multilingual and collaborative dimension of the author’s work.

The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy

Reviewed by: The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy Lydia Heiss The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020. Pp. vii + 345. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-1-64014-046-2. The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century sheds light on current thematic and form-based developments in German-language short story writing and fills the void created by a lack of recent academic publications on the genre. Fifteen years lie between its publication in 2020 and that of the most recent edition of Leonie Marx's important theoretical work Die deutsche Kurzgeschichte. But what exactly constitutes a short story? This is a central issue the volume seeks to address. One of the masters of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe, defined the short [End Page 396] story in his famous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) as a story to be read continuously without interruption achieving a "unique or single effect" (61). The editors of the volume, Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy, unfold their central thesis that the short story form is ever-changing and elusive in terms of a fixed definition. Instead, they advocate for a flexible framework for future research, in which any critical approach—be it thematic, form-focused, or based on a certain theoretical perspective—must be specifically tailored to the author, text, or collection at hand. Concerning the German-language short story, the matter of genre definition is further complicated historically and methodologically by terminology, i.e., the difference between Erzählung and Kurzgeschichte, and the delimitation against other German short prose genres like the Novelle. Furthermore, in the twenty-first century, the World Wide Web and digital media have especially impacted the creation and distribution of short stories. The contributions to the volume are grouped into three sections and address form, function, and theme in the works of both well-known and up-and-coming contemporary authors. The theme-centered part of the first section begins with Katharina Gerstenberger's reflections on the "odd" hybrid genre of Berlin short stories, which takes city literature's primary focus on place and blends it with the short story's focus on plot. The second contribution with thematic emphasis by Todd Herzog explores the close link between Poe's definition of the short story and S. S. van Dine's definition of the detective story and stresses the innovative aspect of short crime fiction. The first section's form-centered part presents the short story as a performative, ambiguous, and subjective genre with a tendency toward the political. Emily Spiers highlights that especially its "dialogic" quality and "fragmentary form" are what make the short story performative (51). Kate Roy's contribution focuses on the shortest form of short story writing, the short-short, stating that its extreme brevity underlines the importance of the implicated and the unsaid. Helmut Schmitz closes out the second part of the first section with his reflections on similarities and differences between the German Novelle and the American short story. The second section comprises eight author-focused essays. In the first contribution on well-known writer Clemens Meyer, Gillian Pye detects a lack of academic attention to his short fiction despite his many prizes and wide press coverage. By showing how it is precisely Judith Hermann's sometimes criticized minimalistic style that makes the reader's own reality "present" (139), Leonhard Herrmann presents more recent works of Hermann as underrated by critics. Heide Kunzelmann expands on Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig's tendency toward open-endedness, moments of crisis, and the uncanny in the Western capitalist world and highlights how he makes the disoriented reader complicit in their construction. Through the example of Swiss author Peter Stamm's publication of his collected short stories, Andrew Plowman explores different approaches to collections, their self-reflexivity and construction. Heike Bartel and [End Page 397] Elizabeth Boa investigate the work of Ulrike Almut Sandig and Sylvia Bovenschen. They find that in the digital age, a time of acceleration, these authors use...

Die Alpe, anime en Afrikaans: “Heidi” as transnasionale teks en kultuurproduk

The name “Heidi” is known and loved all over the world, due to Swiss author, Johanna Spyri’s works, Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (1880) and Heidi kann brauchen, was es gelernt hat (1881), which form part of the classic international children’s literature canon. These stories have since crossed national boarders, by manifesting transnationally in several culture products. The focus of this article lies on the transnational traffic between the original Heidi (1881) and its adaptations. Because “Heidi” as a cultural phenomenon contains universal themes, the product was able to spread globally. This journey stretches from the Swiss Alps, to Japan and finally finds a home in South Africa and Afrikaans. Included in the article is an overview of how the Heidi text manifested in several cultures and its transnational movement, spanning time and place. The popularity of the animation series in South Africa among Afrikaans speaking people is analysed, along with suggestions for possible reasons for this big following and prevalence . The central argument of the article is that “Heidi” as cultural product has had a transnational journey from the Alps, to anime and Afrikaans.

РУССКОЯЗЫЧНАЯ ВЕРСИЯ МЕЖДУНАРОДНОГО ОПРОСНИКА AIDA («ОЦЕНКА ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ ЛИЧНОСТИ У ПОДРОСТКОВ»)

A new diagnostic tool for assessing personal development and its impairment in adolescents 12–18 years old is presented — the international questionnaire AIDA (Assessment of Identity Development in Adolescence), developed by Swiss authors K. Goth and K. Schmeck in 2012. The tool was conceived by the authors as a questionnaire for international use. It has been translated in European, Latin American and Asian countries. Author's requirement to national translations is to reflect the national specifics as much as possible in the wording of all items of the questionnaires. Since 2017, work has been underway to standardize the Russianlanguage version of the questionnaire. The article contains information about the tool itself, the purposes of its creation by the authors and about the work on the Russian-language version within the frameworkof the international program for the cultural adaptation of the questionnaire. The materials of the stages of work, given by the c reator s of the ques tionnaires , the main psychometric properties: Cronbac's alpha, exploratory factor analysis, multivariate analysis of variance are presented. The results of the assessment of the questionnaire in the clinic in 20 adolescents of both sexes with schizotypal personality disorder, examined in the clinic of the Mental Health Research Centre in a hospital or on an outpatient basis, are presented. The results of using the questionnaire showed significant differences between the samples of adolescents with schizotypal disorder and the normative sample, which may be important for building an individual psychotherapeutic program for working with a teenager, as well as for solving differential diagnostic and research questions in borderline psychiatryof adolescence.

L’héritage religieux de Gottfried Keller

Pourquoi Ludwig Wittgenstein était-il fasciné par certaines œuvres du grand écrivain suisse Gottfried Keller ? Cette question a intrigué Jacques Bouveresse et le fruit de cette interrogation a donné son ouvrage Le danseur et sa corde, Wittgenstein, Tolstoï, Nietzsche, Gottfried Keller et les difficultés de la foi (Marseille, Agone, 2014). Dans l’échange qui suit, organisé en mai 2017 par la section genevoise de la Société suisse de philosophie, Jacques Bouveresse et Ruedi Imbach se penchent sur le titre de cet ouvrage, sur l’intention qui a présidé à sa rédaction, mais aussi sur la critique aiguë du christianisme institutionnel, surtout dans sa version doctrinale et doctrinaire, dans certaines œuvres de Keller, ainsi que sur le fort intérêt de Wittgenstein pour ces œuvres et pour cette critique. Les deux auteurs s’accordent pour dire que le christianisme ne s’enseigne pas : il est plutôt quelque chose qui relève de la vie.

„Nasze śląskie Alpy”, a skały „jak ruiny Palmiry czy Persepolis” — albo różne optyki karkonoskich podróżopisarzy

The present article focuses on eighteenth-century German-language descriptions of the Giant Mountains and Izera Mountains included in selected eighteenth-century accounts of trips to the high est mountains of Silesia and Bohemia by travellers from various German-speaking countries. The analysed fragments refer primarily to sites on the Silesian side of these mountain ranges, although the Bohemian part is mentioned in one case. Differing in terms of their countries of origin, the authors of these works — who included Silesians, a German from Bohemia as well as a man from Berlin and a man from Saxony — liked to refer in their accounts to well-known Swiss models, primarily to the poetic works of Albrecht von Haller and scholarly works of Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, comparing the Giant Mountains to the Alps and using in their descriptions of nature metaphors inspired by the famous Swiss authors, whose oeuvres were quite popular across the entire civilised Europe. The present article provides a detailed analysis of the descriptions of the various natural sites and phenomena, in which the authors use the vocabulary of the history of art and culture, comparing, for example, the view of valleys seen from a mountain top to miniature painting, a waterfall to a performance and music, and rock formations to architectural objects and ancient ruins.

Anxious Journeys: Twenty-First-Century Travel Writing in German ed. by Karin Baumgartner and Monica Shafi

Reviewed by: Anxious Journeys: Twenty-First-Century Travel Writing in German ed. by Karin Baumgartner and Monica Shafi Didem Uca Anxious Journeys: Twenty-First-Century Travel Writing in German. Edited by Karin Baumgartner and Monica Shafi. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2019. Pp. viii + 276. Cloth $90.00. ISBN 978-1640140110. In our dizzyingly globalizing world, border crossings and their attendant transnational, multilingual, and cross-cultural encounters are as quotidian as they are central. Recent scholarship on experiences of travel, migration, and exile within [End Page 445] the German-speaking context has developed new theoretical approaches to advance this field in increasingly intersectional and interdisciplinary directions. The fourteen chapters in this volume analyze a cross-section of contemporary travelogues from around German-speaking Europe. It joins other volumes, including Travel Writing in Dutch and German, 1790–1930: Modernity, Regionality, Mobility, edited by Alison E. Martin, Lut Missinne, and Beatrix van Dam (2017), and Passagen des Exils/Passages of Exile, edited by Burcu Dogramaci and Elisabeth Otto (2018), that consider how the physical, intellectual, and psychological experience of leaving one's home and venturing into the great unknown can be aesthetically rendered and what these representations say about the relationship between self and society. Baumgartner and Shafi wisely opt for a broad generic definition of travel writing that includes both fiction and nonfiction produced in a variety of media, though the majority of contributions examine autobiographical novels and short story collections based on their authors' own experiences. Despite its breadth, the volume feels cohesive due to the contributors' shared commitment to a number of issues. These center on the tension between yearning for authenticity, edification, and fulfillment, long held to be essential justifications for travel, and the emergence of their postmodern counterparts—commercialization, fear, and ennui—in a genre where subjectivity and representation are insidiously defined by political, historic, social, and economic factors. Whereas many earlier, canonical works by (white, predominantly male) authors portray the violent intrusion into foreign spaces in order to attain self-discovery through enacting colonial desire, in the contemporary variant, travel and its representation instead routinely lead, as Nicole Grewling argues, to the "disintegration of the subject" (181). The editors note in their introduction that contemporary practitioners of the genre "address the tension between their privileged mobility in the neoliberal world order and the tainted and belated nature of travel," thus "explor[ing] present and past locations with their entangled histories, thereby giving readers the opportunity to reflect on their own place and that of others in the world" (3, 8). As several of the contributors assert, however, these shifts in ideology and positionality do not mean that the texts are unproblematic in their own right, or that their authors can adequately unpack their own complicity in the conditions of inequity that have allowed them to be travelers while others may be variously forced from their homes due to war or catastrophe, or immobile due to lack of disposable income or the "right" passport. To name two examples, Shafi identifies Christoph Ransmayr's "narrative strategies of camouflage and self-effacement" as an attempt to avoid examining his privilege (70), while Nicole Coleman critiques Juli Zeh's method of humanizing through universalization in postconflict Bosnia and Herzegovina because "human rights [thus become] the rights of those perceived to be the same yet by chance living elsewhere, rather than the rights of all human beings despite their differences" (85). [End Page 446] Although many volumes focus on Germany with a token FL-A-CH perspective, a significant number of chapters here consider works by Austrians; a few Swiss authors are also featured, while Christina Gerhardt's essay on Judith Schalansky offers a take on the oft-excluded German Democratic Republic. In each case, the particularities of these contexts are outlined for the nonexpert. The subsection on visual and sonic media includes Christina Kraenzle's analysis of the hybrid travel comic genre and Sunka Simon's analysis of Ulrich Seidl's 2012 film Paradies: Liebe. Both essays consider the ethics of representation amid the power differential between the white German and Austrian cultural producers and the nonwhite and postcolonial objects of their white protagonists' gazes. The volume's expansive definition of...

Die Spur des Stoffs. Ermittlungsrausch in Friedrich Glausers Die Fieberkurve

Abstract This article traces some of the fundamental poetological changes that the traditional crime novel undergoes in the work of the Swiss author Friedrich Glauser at the beginning of the 20th century. The rational-analytical, conservative approach of the criminal novel in the 19th century implied – according to Luc Boltanski – the separation of an epistemologically structured, institutionalized order of “reality” and a chaotic, unruly, unformatted “world” – a separation that is questioned, but reestablished in the dramaturgy of crime and its resolution. By shifting the attention from the logical structure of ‘whodunnit’ to the sensual material culture and “atmosphere” that surrounds actions and people, Glauser’s novels blur these epistemological and ontological boundaries. The article shows how in Die Fieberkurve, the second novel of Glauser’s famous Wachtmeister Studer-series, material and sensual substances develop a specific, powerful dynamic that dissipates, complicates, crosslinks, and confuses the objects and acts of investigation as well as its narration. The material spoors, dust, fibers, fingerprints, intoxicants and natural resources like oil and gas – which lead the investigation from Switzerland to North Africa – trigger a new sensual mode of perception and reception that replaces the reassuring criminological ideal of solution by the logic of “dissolution”. The novel thereby demonstrates the poetic impact of the slogan of modernity: matter matters.

Construire l'auctorialité: les correspondances d'Alice Rivaz

Siguiendo la pregunta planteada por Maria Hermínia Laurel en su excelente artículo titulado "Lecturas de escritores: 'cosmovisión' y referencias literarias en la correspondencia de Alice Rivaz" (2010), proponemos cuestionar las construcciones auctoriales que ocultan la obra de Alice Rivaz. conexión. Autora suiza de la lengua francesa, multiplica las construcciones de una autora, no solo en su obra literaria, que firmará con un nombre, sino también en su prolífica correspondencia con tres autores suizos contemporáneos, que proponemos estudiar aquí. . Following the question posed by Maria Hermínia Laurel in her excellent article entitled “Lectures d’écrivains: ‘vision du monde’ et référents littéraires dans la correspondance d’Alice Rivaz” (2010), we propose to question the auctorial constructions that conceal Alice Rivaz's correspondence. Swiss author of the French language, she multiplies the constructions of a self-author not only in her literary work, which she will sign with a pen name, but also in her prolific correspondence with three contemporary Swiss authors, which we propose to study here. Faisant suite au questionnement posé par Maria Hermínia Laurel dans son excellent article intitulé “Lectures d’écrivains: ‘vision du monde’ et référents littéraires dans la correspondance d’Alice Rivaz” (2010), nous nous proposons d’interroger les constructions auctoriales que recèlent les correspondances d’Alice Rivaz. Auteure suisse de la langue française, elle démultiplie les constructions d’un soi-auteure non seulement dans son œuvre littéraire, qu’elle signera d’un nom de plume, mais aussi dans sa prolifique correspondance avec trois auteurs suisses contemporains, que nous proposons d’étudier ici. Seguendo la domanda posta da Maria Hermínia Laurel nel suo eccellente articolo dal titolo "Letture di scrittori: 'visione del mondo' e riferimenti letterari nella corrispondenza di Alice Rivaz" (2010), proponiamo di mettere in discussione le costruzioni auctoriali che nascondono le Rivel di Alice Rivaz collegamento. Autrice svizzera della lingua francese, moltiplica le costruzioni di un autore di sé non solo nella sua opera letteraria, che firmerà con un nome, ma anche nella sua prolifica corrispondenza con tre autori svizzeri contemporanei, che proponiamo di studiare qui.

Os tribunais de Dürrenmatt

This essay presents the pessimistic and skeptical view of justice by the Swiss author and playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990). The analysis is made based on common aspects identified in his masterpiece The Visit (1956), and in another less known play, A Dangerous Game (1956). Firstly, the plays’ plots are described, compared and contrasted. For a methodological approach, seven “points of inflection” were constructed between the texts, exploring: a) the role, in the plot, of the visits; b) whether Dürrenmatt describes justice as it is, or its deviations; c) the importance of the form of the courts for the characters; d) the justice of the accusations; e) the power of the characters; f) the humor of the plays; and, finally, g) the depiction of death. The conclusion is that despite differences in plot, Dürrenmatt’s plays are an important testament to his disheartening view of institutions.

Kaleidoscope of Swiss Cartography

Kaleidoscope of Swiss Cartography

Communication Problems in Modern German Drama

The article discusses various aspects of the communication problem addressed by contemporary German-speaking playwrights. The development of history led to the fact that at the end of the 20th century, the borders between states were practically erased. The key has become the concept of globalization. Acutely reacting to the problems of modern society, the latest German-language drama reflects, among other things, the problems of the crisis of communication and self-identification that emerged at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries. The main content of the article is an analysis of plays by Swiss authors (“Room for Friends” by A. Jacques and “Yoko-ni” by Eugene), as well as plays “In Emergency” by the German playwright F. Richter. The plays were selected taking into account the fact that the problem of communication is considered in them from different angles. So in the play of F. Richter, a violation of communication within the family comes to the fore (problems of fathers and children, lack of understanding between spouses). The play by Eugene continues this theme, but in a slightly different vein (moving away from reality into virtual space). “Room for Friends” A. Jacques represents communicative failures at the level of intercultural communication. In these plays, the problem of communication is presented from different angles, which makes it possible to assess the scale of this problem.

Transnational Entanglements: Switzerland's Newly Emerging Literary Culture of the 1960s and the Anglophone World

In 1966, Emil Staiger, one of the most prominent literary scholars in literary studies of the postwar era, gave a talk on literature and the public. In his speech, which initiated what came to be known as the Zürcher Literaturstreit, Staiger developed a normative idea of literature as an agent of social cohesion. Around the same time, a new literary culture emerged in Switzerland, one which challenged Staiger's conception by exploring literature's critical potential. This article argues that this more modern direction taken by German Swiss literature was the result of transnational dynamics. Focusing on three examples of literature written by a new generation of Swiss authors (Walter, Federspiel, Bichsel), the article explores the various transnational alliances these authors built with modernist authors, mostly beyond the German‐speaking world, as a means of breaking with literary conventions. Leaving the logic of a national literary history behind, the article argues that seemingly local literary conflicts in 1960s Switzerland arose out of transnational dynamics.

Eine Heilige in Gesellschaft: Formen der Kooperation in der ›Legende von Prothus und Hyacinthus‹ bei Jacobus von Voragine, der Lichtenthaler Schreiberin Regula und Gottfried Keller

Abstract This paper explores variations in portrayals of cooperation and friendship in legends of martyrs, focussing on the ›The Legend of Saints Protus and Hyacinth‹ in different historical contexts. When adapting the legend in the fifteenth-century, the compiler and copyist Sister Regula amended the standard ›Legenda Aurea‹ version by introducing an additional plot line recounting cooperation between two female martyrs. In turn, in the nineteenth century, the Swiss author Gottfried Keller dismissed the notion of spiritual friendship altogether and replaced it with the ideal of a hierarchical relationship between spouses.