Gertrud Leuteneggerâs Metanoic Narrative Kontinent
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The Swiss author, Gertrud Leutenegger, is known for her unconventional texts where quinces and zebra crossings are placed in a syntactic relationship for no better reason than the shared colour yellow. Similarly, her narrative Kontinent (1985) hovers between references to an identifiable Alpine reality and subjective Chinese dream-like sequences and thus makes demands of the reader, problematising the hermeneutic process. The tale is related by a bewildered first person female narrator who undergoes a process of assimilation into a mountain village community. The narrator comes to the village in order to make a recording of sounds from the natural environment for the aluminium works, the major local employer. Her task ironically illustrates the damage caused by the works to the natural environment. It is therefore a text that deals on the one hand with social alienation, while simultaneously addressing the ecological effects of industrialisation. This essay seeks to investigate how these seemingly disparate elements of the work function together and how the authorâs language carries the ecological content.