PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Unlike most contemporary Swiss literary histories, which focus on a single language, Heinrich Ernst Jenny and Virgile Rossel’s Geschichte der schweizerischen Literatur/Histoire de la Littérature Suisse des origines à nos jours (1910) was conceived as a bilingual literary history. This can be seen as an attempt to “multilingualize” a largely monolingual Swiss literary history and to integrate the country’s different linguistic communities into a broader, multilingual national identity. But does the content reflect the form, or do the literary languages merely coexist? Does the multilingualism of the text serve to integrate Switzerland’s linguistic communities, or does it emphasize the existing monolingual cultures? We examine how this bilingual history of Swiss literature relates the languages to each other, and how these are framed in relation to the respective national literatures of the linguistic communities beyond the country’s borders. In doing so, we show how this bilingual literary history challenges—or reinforces—the monolingual paradigm.