Le Grand Retour ou les Grands Adieux ? Le roman de l’exil chez Kundera

Milan Kundera, an intellectual born in Moravia who emigrated to France in 1975, in L’Ignorance leans on the myth of Ulysses to question contemporary realities of exile and return, nostalgia and oblivion. Does the hope of returning to the place of origin really haunt the modern émigré? To what extent does the notion of homeland still have meaning for him? And what happens when the émigré, unlike Ulysses the great nostalgic, prefers to stay with Calypso his lover rather than return to his native land and faithful wife Penelope? With some cynicism, Kundera in L’Ignorance offers scenarios of exile which desecrate and destabilize historically and culturally available standards while allowing us to reflect on new paradigmatic figures of contemporary exile.

Chrétiens ›Roman de Perceval ou le Conte du Graal‹ und Wolframs ›Parzival‹. Ihre Überlieferung und textkritische Erschließung

This article discusses the manuscript transmission of Chrétien’s Roman de Perceval ou le Conte du Graal and Wolfram’s Parzival in terms of their textual tradition and editorial criticism. It shows that the most recent edition of the Old French Perceval (K. Busby 1993) can be viewed as a landmark of the art of conventional editing that appeared at the peak of the discussion of ‘New Philology’ and took its own position in this context. At the same time, the Perceval was subject of critical studies based on the principle of ‘unrooted trees’ that questioned the genealogical concept of traditional ‘Lachmannian’ stemmatology. Conversely, a new edition of Wolfram’s Parzival, based on all known manuscripts, remained a desideratum for decades in German studies. Specific research on the textual tradition played a rather marginal role for a long time, but has been reinforced in the recent years in the context of a new critical edition presenting the totality of manuscripts as well as different textual versions in electronic form. The concept of ‘unrooted trees’ visualizing relationships of manuscript readings can be integrated in this concept. The article gives an overview of these methods, presents examples of editorial techniques, and develops ideas on how to combine the research on the manuscript tradition of both the German text and its French counterpart.