Barcelona und Alterität: Der Blick des Fremden bei Claude Simon und André Pieyre de Mandiargues

Abstract

The starting point for the reflexions is the epistemological postulate to understand "city" itself as a text that is characterized by alterity. According to the specific cultural-sociological prerequisites of the authors, this is not used as a "factual attribute" of aesthetic experience, but as a "methodological principle" with the aim of alienation. Based on the Barcelona novels by two contemporary French authors, it is shown how the construction of foreignness not only serves philosophical-epistemological or aesthetic, but also social innovation. While Claude Simon focuses more on the loss of a political utopia, Pieyre de Mandiargues’s novel deals explicitly with the situation of the Catalans under Franco. It examines how the foreign is experienced, where it becomes aesthetically productive and finally what meaning the foreign imagined in literature acquires in one's own considerations. A complex interaction between authors, their protagonists as personifications of the experience of others and the subject of the city as a carrier of alterity becomes obvious.