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Arising from a colloquium held in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, in March 2004, this volume offers fresh insights into Swiss culture and literature from an Irish perspective. It brings together articles by writers and scholars from various academic fields including cultural studies, linguistics and literature. The book is a reflection of the multifaceted interests of Irish academics in Switzerland as a cultural space in the heart of Europe. Ireland as a vantage point, situated at the western margin of the European continent, offers new perspectives from which differences as well as surprising parallels between the two cultures become visible and from which Switzerland appears in a different light. The volume critically addresses questions of identity in Swiss literature and culture and discusses them from various angles - by analysing the representation of minority cultures in Swiss literary and media discourse, by reading Swiss literature in an intercultural context, but also through accounts of Irish visitors in Switzerland and Swiss writers travelling to or living in Ireland.
List of contents
Contents: Gisela Holfter/Patrick Studer: Aspects of Swiss-Irish relations - past and present - Sabine Egger: Switzerland and Ireland: Places beyond history from the perspective of post-war West Germany - Gabrielle Alioth: Schreibinseln: Betrachtungen zum Leben und Schreiben zwischen der Schweiz und Irland - Patrick Studer/Sabine Egger: 'Blick von außen' - Interview with Peter Stamm - Beate M. Dreike: 'Max, you are a liar'- discourse analysis of a text excerpt from Max Frisch's Montauk - Manfred Lukas Schewe: '... über das Fremdwerden des Eigenen' or 100 years of Switzerland, compressed into a collage of four scenes: Thomas Hürlimann's Das Lied der Heimat - Annette Schiller/Jenny Williams: The digital chocolate factory: A cross-cultural study of Swiss and Irish chocolatier websites - Joachim Fischer: An Irish traveller in eighteenth century Switzerland: Blayney Townley Balfour's letters from Orbe and Berne, 1788/89 - Silvia Ricci Lempen: Swiss minority literatures: A struggle for acknowledgement - Beate Laudenberg: A portrait of Swiss immigrant writers as laureates of the German Adelbert-von-Chamisso prize - Ralph Müller: The inner European border: Swiss German writers' metaphors on Switzerland and Europe - Veronica o'Regan/Patrick Studer: 'Typisch schweizeric': Foreign nationals and the speeding phenomenon in the Swiss press - Valerie Heffernan: Walter M. Diggelmann's Die Hinterlassenschaft and the landscape of Swiss 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung' - Carmel Finnan: 'Es geht ein Wind durch mich hindurch'. The search for Heimat in Aglaja Veteranyi's literary texts - Susan Tebbutt: 'Reisefertig, die Heimat im Arm': Mariella Mehr and her distinctive delight in words - Jürgen Barkhoff: Franz Hohler - a magical realist from Switzerland - Andreas Stuhlmann: Reading Urweider: A new voice in Swiss poetry.
About the author
The Editors: Patrick Studer is Embassy of Switzerland Lecturer in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. He completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in English linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research focuses on media and intercultural studies.
Sabine Egger is a Lecturer in German Studies at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. Currently completing her doctorate at the Humboldt-University of Berlin about images of the 'Other' in the poetry of Johannes Bobrowski, she has published articles on questions of collective identity in 20th-century German literature and culture, the teaching and learning of literature and intercultural awareness.
