Untimely Steps: The Modern Landscapes and Timescapes of Perambulatory Self-Narration

Abstract

This dissertation undertakes a literary history of walking in the German-speaking world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following the development of rail travel in the 1830s, walking takes on an untimely character as a form of movement out of step with a world defined by speed and acceleration. Through an examination of works of first-person narration by Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Robert Walser, I argue that the untimeliness of walking reveals the heterogenous nature of time in modernity and the way in which walking through landscapes marked by this heterogeneity structures self-narration. In Stifter’s Die Narrenburg and Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters, iterative processes of self-writing are linked to walks along paths that have always already been walked. However, the materiality of writing and human alterations to the environment prevent these writing and walking subjects from being able to successfully orient themselves temporally. In Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, this relationship to time is further disrupted by the urban landscape of modern Paris, which continues to serve a mnemonic function for those who walk through it, albeit in a way that resists inscription in narrative form. Robert Walser’s walking texts exhibit a rejection of the strictures of both traditional narrative form and modern temporality. And yet, it is Walser’s preoccupation with the temporal structure of wage labor and rail travel that shape his writings even as he seeks to escape it. An epilogue on the novels of W.G. Sebald consider how walking continues to demonstrate the instability of the past in the wake of war and ecological devastation.