Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturkomparatistik

Spiegel der Gesellschaft von heute? Eine Einleitung zu Familien in der Schweizer Literatur

2022-12-30T17:49:13+00:00

As this introduction and the following contributions will show, family in its many forms continues to be an essential element of social life as well as of literary plots. With regard to Swiss literature, the family in its diversity intersects with a multilingual corpus, opening up a new view of the relationship between social preconditions and literary reflection.

Les familles dans la littérature suisse: miroir de la société actuelle? Introduction

2023-01-19T15:06:54+00:00

As this introduction and the following contributions will show, family in its many forms continues to be an essential element of social life as well as of literary plots. With regard to Swiss literature, the family in its diversity intersects with a multi-lingual corpus, opening up a new view of the relationship between social precon-ditions and literary reflection.

Einblicke in die Entwicklungen im Familienrecht

2023-01-01T20:15:21+00:00

This article outlines the development towards the codification of civil law, the most important cornerstones of the original Swiss “Civil Code” of 1912, as well as important developments in family law, and discusses their societal context. It will become apparent that legislation in family law over the past decades has been primarily characterised by efforts to achieve equality. From the 1970s onwards, legislative revisions were made in an attempt to follow the social developments. Adoption and child law were revised first, followed by marital and divorce law. While these mentioned legal bases were revised in partial steps in the 20th century, same-sex couples did not receive legal regulation of their partnership until the beginning of the 21st century. Whether the non-marital partnership should have their own legal regulation is currently left open by the legislature. In December 2020, however, the doors of the Civil Code opened for same-sex couples. Marriage for all was approved by the people in the vote of 26 September 2021. Nevertheless, this is not the end of the legislative revisions. In the near future, the discussion on equal rights will focus on a new regulation of the law of descent.

Die ambivalente Unergründlichkeit von Familie. Ein Beitrag zum transdisziplinären Diskurs in wissenssoziologischer Perspektive

2023-01-01T20:18:19+00:00

The particular relevance of family in human life and experience, which is addressed in family novels, is also evident in sociological studies. In what way can these views complement each other? The text is meant as a contribution to discuss this question, starting by presenting some statistical data on the contemporary diversity of individual and collective family behaviors. They are summarized in five theses focusing on an elaborated, open understanding of human generativity, i.e. the individual and the institutional shaping of generational relationships. These generalizations allow to build a bridge to studies on the family novel. I postulate that the commonalities of family sociology and family novel can be seen in the critical dealing with notions of normality, the tense shaping of social relationships, and – consequentially – the dynamic search for personal and collective identities. These processes go hand in hand with experiences of ambivalence and practices to cope with them.

Steckt unsere Gesellschaft in Familiengeschichten von heute?

2023-01-01T20:19:38+00:00

This article deals with a selection of contemporary texts by Swiss authors that address the theme of the family in various ways. The question put forward is whether such literary representations still represent today’s families or whether they miss the mark. The variety of literary forms and the spectrum of perspectives in this selection proved far more diverse than expected. Nevertheless, auto-fictional narration is still fundamental, whereby retrospectives of a life lived are conveyed from within the narrator’s own family circle. The discourse of memory continues to dominate substantial parts of the narrative, and a preoccupation with father-son and mother-daughter relations within family constellations still remains relevant. However, humour and irony are also important as a means of creating distance at moments where reality verges on the absurd and the narrator’s own family is shown in a comic light, or where the terrain is delicate, as for example when the action takes place in a nursing home.

Le projet familial face à la société: évolution de la cause féminine dans les oeuvres d’Anne-Lise Grobéty et Rose-Marie Pagnard, des années 1970 à aujourd’hui

2023-01-01T20:21:50+00:00

Family relations and women’s destinies are two recurrent themes in the novels of two prominent figures of the French-speaking Swiss literature, Anne-Lise Grobéty (1949–2010) and Rose-Marie Pagnard (1943–). Although depicting different universes, more politicized in the first and more poetic in the second, a cross-reading of their works allows to observe a similarity in the treatment of the evolution of the feminine cause within the family unit. Two novels from the 1970–1990 period, «Pour mourir en février» (1970) by Grobéty and «La Leçon de Judith» (1993) by Pagnard, attest to the young girl’s difficulty in building her own identity within her family. The female friendship is presented in both works as a prerequisite for the personal fulfilment of female figures. However, it is rejected by the family who perceives it as a threat to the established patriarchal order. On the other hand, filiation novels of the 2000’s, «La Corde de mi» (2006) by Grobéty and «J’aime ce qui vacille» (2018) by Pagnard, reveal an appeasement of the relations between the young girl and her family, in particular the father figure. The sorority is accepted and even recognised as an aid to the reconstruction of the family bond.

„Immer wenn er gestorben war, kam er wieder zurück.“ Jüdische Lebenswelten und Erinnerungsräume in Charles Lewinskys „Melnitz“

2023-01-01T20:23:47+00:00

The contribution is based on the hypothesis that Charles Lewinsky’s novel “Melnitz” should be read as the first literary cultural and social history of Swiss Jews after legal emancipation. On the one hand, it highlights the magical realist figure of Uncle Melnitz, a revenant eyewitness whose existence can be traced back to the violent persecution of Jews during the Cossack Khmelnytskyi Uprising in the 17th century, and who, following the pattern of Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, repeatedly comments on events from the perspective of the Jewish persecutees. Through Melnitz’s commentaries, the generational history of the Meijer family is presented simultaneously as Swiss history and as a collective Jewish history of memory. The identity of the Jews in Switzerland, which is perceived stereotypically as homogeneous from the outside, is in this way continuously renegotiated in the novel between adaptation and self-assurance, such that the demarcation between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures becomes increasingly blurred.

Les récits de filiation de Fleur Jaeggy: remonter les silences hérités du lexique familial

2023-01-01T20:29:23+00:00

Fleur Jaeggy was born in Zurich in 1940 and she lives in Italy since the 1960s. The family reminiscences that spring from her autobiographical works – “I beati anni del castigo” (1989) and “Protelerka” (2001) −, are often detached, fragmentary, veined with melancholy and dominated by introspection, converging in the category of “filiation stories”, defined in 1999 by Dominique Viart. In fact, the author’s family history seems not to exist − it is broken up; it is incomplete and unknown for both the narrator and her reader. It is only once her parents have died and the heritage of objects, notebooks, photos, portraits and papers gathered that the construction of the family building can take place, by tracing the memories’ thread of the daughter. The desire of the narrator to go back up her genealogy without following a chronological thread and by trying to fill in the silences, the ellipses and the omissions, responds less to a poetics of representation than to a need for answers or to a questioning that became imperative at the time of writing. The work is, in this sense, less a portrait than an analysis.

Une famille au-delà de la famille. Jean-François Haas, «Tu écriras mon nom sur les eaux»

2022-12-30T19:05:33+00:00

In «Tu écriras mon nom sur les eaux», published in 2019, Jean-François Haas proposes a reflection on the family based on two distinct models put in opposition. The first, limited and exclusive, corresponds to the archetype of the Swiss family at the beginning of the 20th century. Haas describes it extensively in the first part of his novel before breaking it up and proposing a more open and human counter-model based on fiction and the potentialities offered by literature. Playing on in-tertextuality and the use of personal pronouns, among other things, Haas lays the foundations of an ideal but illusory family model, encompassing humanity in its entirety. By constantly weaving links between different moments of the 20th cen-tury and the present of narration and writing, Jean-François Haas is also building a strong discourse on Switzerland, its institutions and conservatism.

Zum Bild der Familie in Hansjörg Schneiders Kriminalroman „Hunkelers Geheimnis“ im Kontext der Schweizer Flüchtlingspolitik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus

2023-01-19T14:36:52+00:00

This article focuses on detective novel „Hunkelers Geheimnis“ [“Hunkeler’s secret”] (2015), the ninth Peter Hunkeler novel by Swiss-German author Hansjörg Schneider (b. 1938). It sets out to treat in detail the image of the family relevant to this novel with regard to the characters of the perpetrator and murder victim, and to situate them in the historical context. Upon interpreting the text, the author of the present article draws not only on the attendant literature, but also on an interview conducted with the novelist in the form of letters. In the first part, the question of what role the motif of the family plays in the classic and post-classic crime novel, especially from German-speaking Switzerland, is explored. The presentation of the plot structure is followed by an analysis and interpretation of the event leading to a puzzling murder, which reflects Switzerland’s refugee policy during the Nazi period. The fourth part pays heed to the historical context of the event as well as Schneider’s interdiscursive work with specialised literature and historical sources. In the next part, attention is drawn to blurring the line between victim and perpetrator. The last part examines the detective’s family.

Les histoires de famille comme trames parallèles dans le roman à énigme: «Qui a tué Heidi?» de Marc Voltenauer

2022-12-30T19:20:32+00:00

This case study addresses the question of families, both referential and literary, in the 2017 mystery novel «Qui a Tué Heidi?» (“Who Killed Heidi?”), by Swiss writer Marc Voltenauer. It sets out with the assumption that the family, despite the changes undergone, is still perceived as “the uncanny” and fascinates French-speaking authors, including those whose main stake is not its depiction. According to the initial hypothesis, Marc Voltenauer puts family matters at the service of his literary project. Several family stories are woven into the police investigation, which is typical for mystery novels and forms the core of the narrative canvas. These literary families, laden with secrets, dysfunctional and potentially pathogenic, are depicted in a hyperbolic way. Is this just a consequence of genre norms (the detective novel is based on a set of stereotypes) or does the author paint a troubling picture of the contemporary family and its metamorphoses? This is one of the questions the study attempts to answer.

Abschied von der Familie in der deutschschweizerischen Gegenwartsliteratur?

2022-12-30T19:25:52+00:00

According to a frequently encountered view, the family novel is not at all compatible with the modern phenomena of life. On closer inspection, however, it can be seen that such reproaches presuppose a trivialised genre that may be innovatively destroyed or renewed. In response to such reproaches, this article proposes a more general notion of family novel, denoting those narratives whose content and structure are essentially shaped by the relationship between characters in terms of intergenerational biological, cultural or material continuities or discontinuities. In addition, this article argues that the issues of intergenerational relationships still play a role. For instance, actual kinship without stable, affective relationships is an ongoing theme. However, there are Swiss German family novels in which the failure of establishing a strong emotional intergenerational relationship are narrated with a new relaxedness. Failing families or the renunciation of family attachment are no longer existential problems.