Penser la société d’aujourd’hui: le roman policier de Suisse romande
To think about the today’s world: contemporary crime fictions of French-speaking parts of Switzerland

Author(s): Sylvie Jeanneret
Subject(s): Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, French Literature, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: crime fictions; contemporary; French-speaking parts of Switzerland; social critique; reflection about the justice
Summary/Abstract: Contemporary crime fictions (in French: “romans policiers” or, short, “polars”) have proven to be a particularly effective framework for experimenting with the reader’s involvement in literary writings critical of their times. The “polar” makes us think about the injustices of today’s world, its violence and the new forms of human relationships they produce. My argument is based on the work of two Swiss francophone writers – Nicolas Verdan (1971-) and Sébastien Meier (1988-) – with a particular focus on their use of the figure of the anti-hero, their interest in regional specificities of the French-speaking parts of Switzerland and their critical stance on contemporary society. If the close attention the writers pay to mechanisms of social and economic domination is historically a leitmotiv of the genre, the “polar” we are interested in testifies to an almost obsessive desire for justice which takes the form of an ethical posture calling on us to engage with the troubling universe its fictions recreate.

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