Between Equivalence and Adequacy: The Foreignness Experience in the Migration and Adolescence in the Works by Katja Fusek and Irena Brežná
Abstract
The works by exophonic authors born in other countries, who reflect on their migration experience, constitute a vital component of the contemporary Swiss literature written in German. These include two female authors born in the former Czechoslovakia: Irena Brežná (1950), and Katja Fusek (1968).
Their semi-autobiographical novels - Die undankbare Fremde (2012, The Unthankful Stranger), and Novemberfäden (2002, November Fibres), respectively - provide an important perspective on what it meant to "become woman" in Switzerland while having roots behind the Iron Curtain. Drawing on the theories of Bernhard Waldenfels, Joachim Renn, Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak or Yasemin Yildiz, I showed how the experience of foreignness in the context of adolescence and migration manifests in the texts through the motifs of identification, disenchantment, and entanglement.