Comparison of the biographies of two Helvetian writers, whose relationships with the French literary scene proved to be radically opposed, both in terms of their choices of residence, their editorial support and their literary imagination. While Ramuz, making a virtue out of necessity, relies on the literalization of the experience of place, Cendrars develops a literature of rootlessness and straying away. Each one of them had his own way to bypass the handicap of belonging to a minor literary nation (in the sense of Kafka).
Ramuz; Cendrars; Switzerland; literary peripheries